Issue 379

23^rd November 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Thanksgiving! Even though I’m not American and so I don’t officially celebrate this holiday, I have been giving thanks this week for the continuing, positive health changes in my life that have been the focus of my last 18 months. I hope you all took a moment, no matter where you’re located and found something to be thankful for too.

As always, I’m also thankful to this wonderful community for all of the amazing content you produce, and for every one of you who choose to read what I write about it!

Finally, my thanks also go to everyone who gave feedback in last week’s little poll. The kind comments you all left were unexpected, and very touching! The good news is that the overwhelming majority (~96%) voted in favour of keeping my comments in place at the start of the newsletter. I may not write something every week, but when I have something to say about iOS development, here is where I’ll say it.

I also loved that lots of you took the opportunity of the free text field in last week’s poll to leave general feedback. It’s just worth mentioning that you never need to wait for me to ask you for that! Since the very beginning, getting a message to me has been as simple as just hitting reply. These emails are sent from my real email address, and replies always come directly to me.

Dave Verwer

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News

I linked to this last year too, but it has been freshly updated by Marius Landwehr (and others) with a fresh set of deals for this year. This is where to start if you’re looking to treat yourself to some new software, books or training. There’s also this list from Michael Tsai and this one from Lisa Dziuba if you need even more.

This is interesting. In these days of the iPad being once again evaluated as a laptop replacement, Charles Arthur takes a look at the Android side of the same conversation. Android tablets are certainly popular, but I only ever see them being used to play movies or games.

Tools

Here we go! SourceKit-LSP can now power code completion, quick help and a few other features in Visual Studio Code! Mattt walks us through the steps needed to get everything up and running. I tried this and it worked really well for me!

Code

Vlas Voloshin with an interesting exploration of a few private ARKit APIs that allow recording of session data. The best case for these APIs is that they weren’t quite ready for iOS 12, and were pushed out to next year. The worst case is that they were developed for Apple’s internal testing, and they’ll stay private. Either way, as long as you don’t ship code that uses them you can still use them in your internal testing!

After completing localisation of a new app, Eric Blair realised that while localisation hasn’t changed fundamentally in a long time, the small changes have really added up. This article will bring you bang up to date with everything you need to know.

I really liked this article from Paul Samuels on testing for retain cycles in your Swift code. The concept is pretty simple, but the tips he gives here make testing for this really simple and something you could build into a more comprehensive test suite.

This article from Freya Holmér is wonderful. It’s the clearest demonstration of how a Bézier curve works that I’ve ever seen. The tool that she built for visualising curves is also fantastic.

Every time I see a project with “Weekly” in the name, I think back to 2011 and remember thinking “How hard can it be to do something consistently on a weekly basis?” 😀 Every time I see a project start with “Daily” in the name, I feel for the author!

macOS Development

No sign of BBEdit yet, but the promised return of Transmit from this year’s WWDC finally happened. Here’s the news from Panic’s blog, and there’s also this article by Daniel Jalkut on the entitlements that it uses.

Videos

The full set of videos from Swift Heroes which took place in Italy just a couple of weeks ago. This should keep you busy for the weekend!

Note: By the way, if you organise a conference, and would like to see your videos linked here please feel free to let me know when you post them. I’m never quite sure exactly when all the uploads for conference videos are complete. I understand that it sometimes takes several weeks to complete the process, and I don’t like linking to half finished playlists as it’s unfair to some of the speakers!

And finally...

This is a beautiful example of an unintentional bit of usability. 🤪