Issue 401

Comment

The big news this week was the acquisition of Realm by Mongo DB. The acquisition isn't necessarily bad news in itself, and predictably the blog post paints a rosy picture but track records are bad in these situations. Remember Parse? StackMob? In fact, when I had a brief look at the state of MBaaS providers (taking this list as a starting point) it's interesting to see how many of them have pivoted beyond recognition over the last couple of years.

I think it all just goes to show how incredibly hard it is to build a business in developer tools and technologies. An investment of $40m is a huge hole to dig out of though, did it really need that much capital? I know the situation is complex and I really don't know anything about what their plan was, or what went wrong. All I know is that selling for $39m after taking $40m in investment is a sad situation. 😞

That said, I still love their product. It's great technology and it works really well so I really do hope it thrives with the new management. 🤞

News

The best way to improve your code…

That title is a tempting one, right? Is it TDD? FRP? Or some other TLA that's hot this week? Of course not. 😀 This is something that's been on my mind a lot since I recently bought a sleep tracker and confirmed that I don't get anywhere near enough sleep. Thanks to Hillel Wayne for the reminder that our productivity isn't always about the things we do inside work.

Tools

Accio

Do we really need another dependency manager? 😬 This new project from Cihat Gündüz uses both SwiftPM and Carthage together. My hope is that Apple will remove the need for this project (and other dependency managers) very soon and give us what we need for iOS and macOS development with SwiftPM and Xcode. It really is time. Maybe this summer?

Simple XCTest Log Formatter in Swift

Whether you're interested in the specific log formatting that Vojta Stavik is doing, or whether you're more interested learning how to process logs to build your own tool, you'll want to take a look at this article.

Code

Experimenting With Windowing on iPad With PanelKit

One of the potential features of iOS 13 is windows, or panels, or something! 😂 Is it just going to be to support Marzipan windowing on the Mac? Maybe. But if it also came to iPad, what would it look like? Calvin Chestnut has had a play with PanelKit by Louis D'hauwe which gives a glimpse of one possibility.

SwiftLocation 4

What would a Swift inspired API to Core Location look like? I think it'd look a lot like this library from Daniele Margutti. Updated for Swift 5 and ready to go.

Common pitfalls with background URLSession tasks

Yes, URLSession networking is great, but it's not without some sharp edges. Antoine van der Lee goes through a few special cases you'll want to be aware of.

Spotlight Indexing for Your App Content

At first glance iOS apps appear to be siloed behind that tiny little Springboard icon, and in early versions of the operating system that was certainly true. It's not really the case anymore though and app extensions, Siri intents, URL schemes and other technologies mean that our apps are available much more widely. Did you know you can insert content from your app into Spotlight for example? Junda Ong explains.

Up to Speed

How to make auto layout more convenient

If you're just getting up to speed with iOS development, then you'll also be getting up to speed with Auto Layout! So get there quicker with Khoa Pham's article that has a quick history of the technology, how use it from code and some of the more popular libraries that'll help you work with it. The only thing I'd say is missing is any focus on Interface Builder, which you definitely shouldn't avoid!

Videos

Videos from try! Swift Tokyo 2019

Got some free time to watch some conference talks this weekend? If so, what about this fantastic set of talks from the try! Swift Tokyo conference that happened in March.

And finally...

The definitive answer to the age old question...

Is it G as in gate... G as in general… or is it… 🤣

Issue 401 April 26th 2019