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squareup.com
News
Apple Tech Talks - iPhone XS, XS Max, XR and Apple Watch Series 4
As always, new hardware brings new APIs along with it and this year is no different. There's a few new videos available on the developer videos page. Check out Building Apps for iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR, Designing for Apple Watch Series 4 and Developing Complications for Apple Watch Series 4.
apple.com
The Future of Fabric
This isn't surprising, I've been expecting an announcement ever since the acquisition last year. The bad news is that Firebase is now a required dependency if you want to continue using Crashlytics, and that some other features of Fabric are going away completely. It's not that Firebase is bad, far from it! You'll even get more features when you make the switch, but it is a big dependency if you were previously only using Crashlytics.
fabric.io
Tools
Silencing warnings for CocoaPods dependencies
I've never been a big fan of disabling all warnings when importing a CocoaPod, so I was interested to see this little hack from Artur Grigor which allows specific warnings to be turned off for a pod. Of course, a better solution to this is to fix the warnings in the pods you are using and submit pull requests! 🛠
medium.com
Code
How Apps Adapt to the Series 4 Apple Watch Screen Sizes
Geoff Hackworth was fast out of the gate with this post with everything you need to know about the new watch sizes. He also has a similar post for the new iPhone models. Thanks Geoff!
medium.com
What I Learned Making 5 ARKit Prototypes
I talked about some of Nathan Gitter's ARKit prototypes back in Issue 362 so I was pleased to read this write up of his experiences building them. Some of these are really interesting experiments, and they all have value.
medium.com
CMMotionActivity
Is CMMotionActivity about to get a "falling" state after this week's announcements? Probably not, but it does have states for many other classes of movement like cycling, walking, running and travelling in a vehicle. Mattt Thompson gives it the NSHipster treatment.
nshipster.com
Building a Form Library
After last week's link to DataSourceKit, this week sees more talk of declarative table views with this post from Chris Eidhof and Florian Kugler. The post is great, but there's also more than four hours of video to accompany it. Comprehensive!
objc.io
Increasing the tap area of a UIButton
More follow up, this time it's Roland Leth following up on last week's post on overriding hit testing. In this post, he talks about a clean way to increase the tappable area of a button.
rolandleth.com
Design
iPhone Device Templates
Before the keynote had even ended, these device frames for the new iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max devices were made available. It takes a while for the official marketing images to be released so this is perfect for getting everything updated with the latest device frames. There's also an iPhone XR version available if you want some colour!
applypixels.com
How big is the Apple Watch Series 4?
A fun set of images showing how the size of the new watch, and the new screen has changed with this iteration. I think this one is an especially good look at how the huge increase in screen size only makes a tiny difference to the watch size.
twitter.com
Business and Marketing
Most apps are free
Just in case you were in any doubt how Apple see the future of paid up front apps on iOS, here's a reminder from the bottom of the marketing page for the iPhone XS. Also this week, Apple published a case study video on adopting subscription pricing. They are sending a pretty clear and consistent message on what they'd like us to do at the moment.
twitter.com
Go Go Go! Submission for both iOS 12 and macOS Mojave apps has been enabled with the Xcode 10 GM release that arrived directly after Wednesday's event. I can't wait for all the new Siri activities that'll surely start appearing with these updates! 🤖
It does look like it's not yet possible to submit apps that include the new complication APIs though, but who is crazy enough to have those ready only a few hours after they were announced? 🤔
I won't talk much about the new hardware as you've undoubtedly read a million words on that already. The only thing I'll say is that as someone who has started taking my health much more seriously in the last year, the new watch was what stood out to me. The general improvements are fantastic, and AFib detection and ECG are incredible features. The AFib detection is also a great example of how something that we first saw as a ResearchKit project has now fed into the core operating system. This is fantastic work from Apple and I still believe HealthKit has great potential to change the world of medicine even further. I do hope they get the necessary approvals to roll out these features outside the US though! I'm lucky that my heart is doing 👌 for now, but I'd still like the watch be able to keep an eye on it!
I had no hesitation in ordering a new watch (and phone!) as the pre-orders opened this morning, even if it was from a slightly unusual location. 😂
Dave Verwer