Issue 381

7^th December 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Let’s start this week with this post from John Gruber:

But it speaks to how weak this convention is that Procreate Pocket could do something not just different but totally different — multi-finger taps with no on-screen buttons — and not just get away with it but be celebrated by Apple for it.

I agree that the Undo “gesture” of shaking the device is awful, but experimentation with interactions on small screen touch devices are really important and fundamental advances in iOS have happened because of them. A good example is what happened when Loren Brichter was trying to find a way to remove the refresh button from Tweetie, and came up with Pull to Refresh. While often misused, this was still a genuine step forward for the platform and it came from a UI experiment in a 3rd party app.

John’s point is more that we’re ten years into small screen touch UI, and we’re still struggling to have a good system wide UI for undo. That’s a very valid point, of course, but I hope we’ll all keep experimenting until we get there. This doesn’t always have to come from Apple.

Dave Verwer

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News

No, you’re not subscribed to the wrong newsletter! 😂 I couldn’t let this announcement pass though. Microsoft have been working in the open for many years, but recently made their UI frameworks open source too. The cynical amongst you might argue that native Windows development needs a boost (which it certainly does) but I still think this is remarkable, no matter the motivation. Don’t hold your breath for open source UIKit or AppKit though!

You probably saw the announcement of the awards, but what does being in that list mean for actual revenue? There’s some really interesting numbers (both surprisingly low, and surprisingly high) to look through here.

Tools

It’s easy to forget that fastlane can automate much more than code signing and App Store releases. What about using it to release new versions of open source libraries you maintain to CocoaPods? Marcos Griselli shows us how.

It must have been the week to automate CocoaPod updates because Max Howell also wrote on the same subject a few days ago.

I think it’s safe to say that the “new” Xcode extensions have been a disappointment, mainly due to the restriction of only operating on one file at a time. That doesn’t stop people occasionally trying to do useful stuff with them though, like this comment spell checker from Velislava Yanchina. This’d be great if it could check a whole project. 🤓

Code

This new snapshot testing library from Stephen Celis and Brandon Williams is really interesting. As you’d expect it can do image snapshots for your views and controls, but what if you just wanted to check that the view hierarchy was the same, without being pixel perfect about it? Actually, what if you wanted to snapshot anything. Looks great.

With often forgotten API features like layerClass, maskView and UITintAdjustmentMode, this could easily have been an NSHipster article. It’s not though, it’s over at the iOS Dev Recipes site.

Static table views have been around for a long time. They’re really useful but they can’t be used as part of another view controller, can they? Of course they can. Axel Kee explains.

If your fancy new library is “Whatever Native”, and the front page of your website is all about how everything is just like if you had written it with the platform vendors recommended toolchain, then you have a moral responsibility to make that statement true in the ways that it matters most. One of those ways is accessibility.

It’s really easy to forget things like this when looking at something like React Native.

macOS Development

We knew to expect changes requiring the new notarization (sic) feature in Mojave, but I must admit they’re happening quicker than I expected. Also, this is worth a read from Jeff Johnson.

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And finally...

My favourites were from Nick Lockwood, Evan Dekhayser and this absolute cracker from Graham Lee. 😂