Issue 394

8^th March 2019

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

As part of my continued attempt to fight the negativity around Marzipan I want to highlight the amazing work that Steve Troughton-Smith has been doing this week.

Marzipanify has been around for a while, but this week Steve kept himself very busy with three lengthy blog posts about it. Bringing iOS Apps to macOS Using Marzipanify, Making Marzipan Apps Sing, and Deeper Integration with Marzipan. The posts speak for themselves and you should read them all if you have even a passing interest in the technology.

I love the attitude with which he is approaching these posts though. He’s not just looking at what shipped last year, he’s pushing to see what the technology might be capable of when it’s (presumably) announced this summer. For example:

With just a little care and attention, suddenly your UIKit Mac app no longer feels like a foreign invader. It’ll fully be within developers’ power to make great Mac apps w/ UIKit.

Best of all, he’s doing all of this with a hacked together, half baked version of this technology that was far from ready last year. I can’t wait to see what’s possible after Apple have spent another year working on it internally. 🎉

Brent Simmons also gets it. I have a very similar list of questions that I’ll be watching for answers to during this years WWDC.

I’m genuinely excited to see what’ll be possible… and I’m not even planning to write an app with it. 😀

Dave Verwer

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News

This is a fascinating move by Nintendo. There are two sets of business models on the App Store - Games with microtransactions, and then everything else. 😂 It’s probably way too late for iOS game business models to change, expectations have been well and truly set. However, I do wonder what would have happened if Apple took this stance in the early days of the race to the bottom.

Tools

The source breaking changes with Swift 5 aren’t huge, but you may not be able to upgrade all of your projects that use shared code immediately. If that’s the case, this tip from Alan Zeino will come in handy.

Code

It wasn’t really possible to grok AppKit development without properly understanding the responder chain, but it is far less critical to your ability to make apps on iOS. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful though! Bruno Rocha has some thoughts on it.

It’s also worth mentioning that John Fox talked quite a bit about the responder chain in this week’s iDeveloper podcast. Give it a listen.

What happens when you realise your watchOS app doesn’t actually need much of a UI at all? You build a complication, of course. This is a fantastic article from Kuba Suder with everything you need to know about making an app for a tiny section inside a tiny screen. 😀

Ideally, we’d love to fully switch to Apple’s os_log API. However, it has one major downside: There’s still no way to access the rolling log to add to the reports that get sent back to us.

There are ways though, as Peter Steinberger explains here.

I’m honestly not sure what to think of this… Is it a vision of the future, or the work of an evil genius? This is Jason Zurita talking about how to write a Swift powered web site using AWS Lambda functions. I don’t see this as a particularly practical way to approach web development, but it’s worth a read.

Design

I’ve been enjoying Steps since it was released, it’s a fun and ruthlessly simple steps competition for friends. What’s more interesting than the app though, is how it was designed. Let Simeon tell you all about it.

Business and Marketing

Need a quick and easy way to generate a simple landing page for your latest app? Emil Baehr has put together this great Jekyll theme for showing off your latest creation by grabbing metadata from the store. 👍

Videos

A full set of videos from last year’s Server Side Swift conference if you’ve been curious about Vapor, Kitura or anything else related to building web things with the language!

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And finally...

Yes, it was just a silly throwaway slip that anyone could have made but that doesn’t mean it’s not an opportunity for endless jokes, like this redesign of Apple’s web site from Scott Knaster! 😂

Oh and well played Tim! I’ve captured a screenshot, in case it has been changed back by the time you read this!