Issue 397

29^th March 2019

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

As you may have seen, I shut down App Review Times earlier this week. It’s always tempting to use the word unfortunately when writing a sentence like that, but I see this as a happy announcement rather than a sad one. It’s simply not needed any more, and what better end could I have hoped for a site like this? 🎉

So why even mention it? I know (because I asked a year ago) that this will be a disappointment to some people. In my opinion, the site has been fairly useless since review times suddenly dropped in 2016, but I shut it down because recently people had been contacting me saying that review times were spiking again. It turned out that wasn’t true but there’s so little data coming in that a few results can make it appear like the average is rising. People trust the site and it was misleading them, it’s time for it to go. I wrote up some history, and a better explanation of why over on my blog.

I also wanted to say Thank You to everyone who contributed review times over the years! I think we make a truly useful site for the time that this was a problem. If you helped by submitting your data, you’re part of it. 🏆

Dave Verwer

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News

I’m not going to talk about this week’s event, you’ve heard all the hot takes already. I will link to this thought by Max Rudberg though. He wasn’t the only person to bring this up, but I think he phrased it best. Apple should be holding themselves to the same standards they hold 3rd party developers to, it’s that simple.

Xcode 10.2 is probably already installed on your machine, and with it comes the final release of Swift 5. There are no surprises in this post but it’s a good summary of the release. You might also want to check out my favourite way to see what changed in every version of Swift.

On we go to 5.1… 🚆

Scholarship applications are now closed, and as always it’s inspiring to see what the next generation of developers is up to. Good luck to everyone who submitted something! 🎉 See you there.

Tools

Zoë Smith with the rarest of all mythical creatures, a useful Xcode source editor extension! 🦄 Install it, assign a few keyboard shortcuts and you’ll never need to type fileprivate again.

While we’re on the subject, Zoe also wrote up a great article for NSHipster on writing extensions. In fact, that’s how I found AccessControlKitty in the first place.

The lure of a constantly increasing build number is something that always sounds so good. Does Curtis Herbert finally have the perfect solution? This is surprisingly simple, and he calls it “perfect” which makes me really look forward to the 2020 version of this post. 😂

Code

When I saw that Marcin Krzyzanowski’s CryptoSwift hit 1.0 this week I checked how long it was since I had linked to it. Turns out somehow I never did, so let’s fix that! What is it? Pure Swift implementations of plenty of crypto algorithms. 👍

Using Objective-C from Swift projects is probably something you’re already doing, but how about C? Or, dare I say it… C++? Cecilia Humlelu talks about how to get all kinds of permutations of these languages working together.

Remember associated objects from Objective-C? Of course they can still be used in Swift. Is this a good idea? Well, like with so many things the answer is “It depends”… 😀 Luis Recuenco has some thoughts on the subject that are worth reading though.

Let’s finish this week’s code links with a fun one from Khoa Pham. Create hand-drawn representations of geometric shapes and paths. Everything is rendered as a CALayer too which is handy.

Design

When I think about what to write below each link in the newsletter, I usually try and something I enjoyed in the article and go from there. As I was reading this I nodded along with every single point Justin Hileman made, which is great but it doesn’t get a summary written! 😂 Just go and read this if you work with a design team.

Is there a new font on the way from Apple? Hidden away in this (great, but off topic for this newsletter) article from Arun Venkatesan is something interesting. He thinks it’s a rounded version of San Francisco that isn’t San Francisco Compact Rounded (used by the watch). Maybe we’ll see some rounded fonts creeping in to iOS 13?

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And finally...

This is really a terrible missed opportunity. 😂