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News
App Store Connect Holiday Schedule
You've got one week (or less!) if you want to get an update out in time for the annual Apple holiday break where app review takes a few days off! Get submitting... 🚀
apple.com
Analysis of the Nest app for iOS
There's always plenty of grumbling about the size of iOS apps from certain larger companies. It's usually followed by some vague complaint about it all being analytics and tracking frameworks... But what is really making the Nest app require a ~240Mb application package? Alexandre Colucci digs in to figure it out.
timac.org
Tools
SwiftRewriter
First there was SwiftFormat (which is still very actively maintained!) but this week saw the first release of a new code formatter by Yasuhiro Inami and it's based on the new SwiftSyntax library. Now, let the great debate on the correct position for opening braces begin! ⚔️
github.com
Xcode file variants without targets
There are many ways to configure versions of your apps with build time settings (for example, switching between staging/production server API endpoints) but I hadn't seen Xcode Build Rules used for this purpose before. Bartosz Polaczyk shows us how.
My only slight warning here would be that Build Rules can be a little hidden away inside the Xcode UI, so be careful that everyone on your team knows how the magic happens if you use this!
medium.com
Code
Take our Undo Gesture!
I briefly mentioned the chatter about the Procreate undo gesture in my comment last week. Well, they followed up that conversation by releasing a demo project for their undo gesture implementation. The gesture is simple, but the project is worth looking at if you need a refresher on getting multiple gesture recognisers to work well together.
procreate.art
Optimizing Images
Jordan Morgan with a great article on how much memory the huge images your app is loading are really taking, and gives us some tips on how to reduce it. Your instinct may be to think "Oh, my shiny new iPhone has 4Gb of RAM", but this stuff still matters.
swiftjectivec.com
Replicating Apple Music card deck transition
Aleksandar Vacić talking about iOS 11 style slide up card UI libraries...
I tried both and they both lacked certain details that make the transition totally joyful.
He had my attention with that statement. I love it when someone really sweats the details on a UI interaction like this. CardPresentationController is the end result of that sweating.
aplus.rs
Design
Delightful animations
Talking of sweating the details, here's Roland Leth on the subject of small extra animations to really give your app that final coat of polish.
rolandleth.com
The Thumb Zone
There were a spate of articles a while ago covering the topic of iOS being less and less usable with a single hand, especially as iPhone devices get bigger and bigger. They all documented the problem well, but were usually devoid of solutions. Joe Cieplinski puts that straight this week by offering illustrations of several techniques he has employed in his app RECaf to ensure it's still "thumb-able".
joecieplinski.com
Up to Speed
Measuring Your App’s Memory Usage with Instruments
It's been a while since I made use of the Up To Speed category, but this article from Mark Szymczyk fits the bill very nicely if you haven't yet dived into Instruments.
swiftdevjournal.com
Videos
Functional Swift Conference 2018 Videos
The last iOS conference of the year (maybe?) was the Functional Swift Conference which happened just over a week ago in New York. Are there videos up already? Of course there are!
funswiftconf.com
Sponsored Jobs
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Just a quick heads up before we get started with the links this week, I'm going to be launching an iOS developer job board in January. 📆
I've been thinking about running an iOS jobs site for a long time, and what's the first thing you do when you have an idea like that? You register a new domain name, of course! So the domain has been sitting around since 2013 😂 but I never went through with creating the site. Not because it wasn't a good idea, but because other people in the community were already doing a great job filling that need. The Core Intuition job board and Natasha the Robot's Swift Jobs were the best options, but over the years the maintainers of those two sites have moved on to bigger and better things, and nothing (that I know of) has effectively replaced those job sites.
So, earlier this year I started putting something together. It's a job board, but it will also tie in with the jobs section of iOS Dev Weekly. In fact it'll be the only way to get your job listed in the newsletter as of January.
I hope to build something that's truly useful for both iOS developers who are looking for a new challenge, and for companies who are looking to hire.
So why am I telling you about this now, if it launches in January? Two reasons. First of all, if you're looking for a job, you can sign up for the weekly job digest now. Or, if you or someone you know of is looking to hire an iOS developer in the new year, sign up for early access to post your job listing and be there at the launch of the site!
Dave Verwer