Issue 385

4^th January 2019

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy new year everyone! 🎊

There’s been lots of talk about Marzipan apps recently, and not all of it has been positive. 😂 I want to add my voice to the conversation, mainly to say that we should be careful what we criticise at this point! I think it’s important to make a clear distinction between what has been officially released, and what hasn’t even been previewed yet.

Mojave’s Marzipan apps: News, Home, Stocks and Voice Memos are fully released, non-beta apps that ship pre-installed with the operating system. They are absolutely fair game for being criticised. In my opinion though, Marzipan itself shouldn’t be judged yet. The only official information we have is still just a few slides from the WWDC keynote and everything else is from spelunking or assumptions based on the Mojave apps.

It’s certainly true that Mojave’s Marzipan apps are not great. I won’t go over the points that have been made by other people, but I mostly agree with them.

I do want to urge caution with those who are jumping from criticising those apps, to assuming that everything produced with the framework will be similar. The internal version of Marzipan that was used to build those apps is virtually unchanged from regular UIKit. In fact, you can even take a simulator build of an iOS app and convert it! 🚀

I have no idea what’s going to be presented at this year’s WWDC, but I do know it’s not going to be the same framework that was used to build Mojave’s Marzipan apps. I’m not expecting huge changes, but there’s a good reason they didn’t release a developer preview last year. My hope is that the last 12 months have been spent refining and extending UIKit to be a great fit on macOS.

I’m excited to see what the official release brings, and whether we see more of macOS being built with it. I’m very hopeful we’ll be using it to make amazing macOS apps for years to come though.

Dave Verwer

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News

Is Netflix a big enough loss to force a re-think of the rules around pricing on the App Store? There’s plenty happening around percentages in hosted app stores at the moment, and this is certainly going to get Apple’s attention. I don’t expect it to prompt changes, but you never know.

Tools

Who knew that Quick Help worked on Xcode build settings just like it does with code? Thanks to Brian Croom for pointing this out!

I started reading this article from John Sundell asking myself how many tips and tricks there could be for something as simple as a playground? Turns out there’s lots! 👍

Code

I linked to code to help detect captive WiFi portals a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t know about this library from Ross Butler at the time. A much more comprehensive solution to the problem!

Aleksandar Vacić with a great post (and library) on how he has tried to integrated the coordinator pattern with UIKit. The library extends UIResponder which gives it plenty of flexibility in use and the library is tiny, which is also a good sign. Worth checking out.

I remember when I learned Ruby there was a time where it seemed that every problem could be solved with method_missing. 😂 I do fear we may go down that route with @dynamicCallable and @dynamicMemberLookup a little over the next year or so but I also quite liked this library from Saoud Rizwan though which gives JavaScript style access to JSON data.

How about also using it to call shell commands? Maybe not!

Result is being made official in Swift 5. To celebrate, Paul Hudson has written up an article all about it! 🚀

Design

I was trying to solve a problem that has been solved for decades.

macOS style menus aren’t going to be a good fit for most apps, in fact I’d say that they are only going to be useful in a tiny number of apps. Codea is one of them though, and that’s what Simeon Saëns writes about here. There’s also a part two and a code sample.

Linzi Berry with a fantastic article about where to position (x) buttons in modal popovers. You might think this is simple, but there’s more to think about than you might first imagine.

Business and Marketing

This looks really cool. Quickly put together a video that looks like it was made in After Effects, without needing to spend hours and hours in After Effects! 😂 Live footage from the phone can be included as you record too. It’s not yet available, but this looks great.

Up to Speed

If you’re just getting started with iOS development this article from Axel Kee will be useful. In these days of six core CPUs inside our pocket computers it’s slightly less important to know about the performance reasons for cell reuse in table and collection views. It’s still important if you find yourself with weird behaviour though.

And finally...

This is amazing… 📷