Issue 402

3^rd May 2019

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Only four weeks to go until our world changes again… 🎉

Dave Verwer

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News

Ever wanted to watch the video courses on the Ray Wenderlich site, but didn’t quite get to the point of laying down money for a subscription? Well, now’s your chance because all video courses are freely accessible from now until Sunday. Pick a topic and learn something new this weekend.

For full disclosure, Ray has been a regular sponsor of this newsletter. This link is completely independent of that though and is here purely because I think you should take advantage of it. 👍

There has been plenty written on this subject over the last couple of weeks and honestly I wasn’t going to link to any of it. 🙄 Then I read this article from Carolina Milanesi and it’s the fairest look at the situation that I have found so far, so here it is.

My thoughts? This kind of app should be able to exist, but MDM was a really flawed hack to work around the restrictions of the platform. I’m in favour of MDM only being used for… well, MDM. 😀

Tools

It’s probably not too much of a hassle to have a Mac connected to your app so you can use Reveal or the built in Xcode view hierarchy debugger. But, if you need it on device then this new library from Indragie Karunaratne has you covered.

We have SceneKit in our in-app debuggers now… the future is 💯!

Talking of runtime debugging tools here is MTHawkeye, also released this week. Whether this is appropriate for your app is going to depend on many things but if you need the kitchen sink of in-app information, this tool might be what you need.

Code

A button that looks like… a button? What kind of upside down world are we living in? 😂 That’s the promise of this library from Tim Oliver though. I’m not sure I buy the performance problems that this is working around, is cornerRadius really slow? Even so, it’s nice to have this button style which is quite commonly used in the iOS system apps quickly to hand.

Talking of buttons, have you ever struggled to figure out the correct incantations to separate the text and image in a UIButton? Noah Gilmore struggled with this, so he built a test harness that makes this possible. 😂

A new author over at NSHipster is always worth celebrating! This time it’s Joshua Emmons and his first topic is error handling in modern Swift. He also looks ahead to a possible future with async/await.

Design

Designing app icons is different from designing web sites, logos, and almost every other type of design. Making your app stand out in a squircle shaped package is a unique skill so Michael Flarup has put together almost 2 hours of video tutorials on how to develop it. I’ve not finished watching it yet, but it’s great so far.

For full disclosure, I asked for a review copy of this course and was provided with one.

Asset catalogs are certainly a step forward from how we used to organise our assets, but their structure on disk certainly means it’s harder to work with export automation workflows. Marc Edwards has some thoughts on the subject… Oh and be sure to read all the way to the end for some thoughts on why you shouldn’t be using PDF assets too! 😂

Business and Marketing

Great post from Becky Hansmeyer on reflecting on the original vision you had for your app, and expanding it to create a potentially bigger market. 👍

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And finally...

This story from Chris Zacharias is long, but completely worth your time. I especially enjoyed how it spread to the Google Docs team:

Shortly thereafter, the Google Docs engineers whipped up their own IE6 banner and pushed it into production, presumably under the mistaken assumption that we had done our diligence and had received all of the necessary approvals.

Writing this story up after all this time must have felt fantastic 😀