Issue 378

16^th November 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

You may have noticed that I’ve been putting more time into writing introductory comments over the last year. Now that you’ve had a while to get used to it, I’d love to to hear your thoughts on what you think and whether you’d like them to continue.

Let me know what you think! It’ll only take 5 seconds. Thank you. 🚀

Dave Verwer

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News

It was announced a couple of weeks ago, got the NSHipster treatment last week and now it’s arrived. I’m excited to see what all of the various editors and IDE alternatives do with this. I’ll also be watching for non-obvious uses and experiments that might come out of this being released. Are you working on something, let me know!

Tools

Rob Whitaker talking about Robot Pattern Testing on iOS, using XCUITest. It’s not a revolutionary idea, but I do love the incredibly readable test code that comes out of the technique. 👍

After last week’s release of Sherlock, Antoine van der Lee has followed up with a review of a few tools that live in the same space.

Note: I was happy to see this post as it gives me a good excuse to again link to Reveal, an app that was definitely on my mind last week as I wrote about Sherlock. The nature of a weekly newsletter means that most links are about new things, but I struggle to know when or how to link to things I’ve previously talked about. Tools come and go and code libraries can be even worse! Maturity and maintenance matters. I often link to open source projects that are brand new, but are they going to be maintained? Have they been used in real world apps? Posts like this are a great excuse for me to link to some old favourites again, but the problem continues. 🤔

Code

Who even knew that Core Animation archives were a thing? This is an amazing article from Guilherme Rambo on how to create and play them back in your apps. I had absolutely no idea about this, but even if you did know about them, did you know you could use them in production?

There’s nothing wrong with subclassing when you’re looking to create a custom control, but it’s not always necessary. I like this short, but sweet tip from the Swift Talk team.

John Sundell with a quick wrap up of tips for using iPad to the best of its ability. Recognising gestures specific to touches, or the pencil. Harnessing the new double tap gesture and supporting external screens. 👍

The actual process of subclassing NSInputStream wasn’t fun. Broadly put, subclassing NSInputStream is hard.

Soroush Khanlou with another great article, this time covering multipart/form-data uploads.

Design

This is a subtle tip, but a great one from Ryan McLeod. It’s not an in depth article, but that’s not needed. It’s just something that will make your UI better.

Business and Marketing

I really wish more people blogged as openly and honestly about the business side of their app as Curtis Herbert does. If you run (or are thinking of running) an indie business selling apps directly to consumers, you should be reading everything on this blog.

And finally...

😂