Issue 403

10^th May 2019

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

This week turned out to be a week full of declarative UI. 🚀

First, almost immediately after I published last week’s issue, Matt Gallagher posted this fantastic piece on declarative views. It’s well worth a read, and offers some thoughts on the problems of non-declarative views, as well as putting into words some thoughts on how Apple might approach this problem.

Then, I saw Daniele Margutti’s Owl framework for declaratively putting together table and collection views. It’s not the first framework of this type, and it most likely won’t be the last either! It’s comprehensive though, and is worth a look.

Finally, Google released a new declarative UI framework (which I found via this hot take 😀) at their I/O event this week.

Coincidence? Aren’t Apple rumoured to be developing some kind of declarative UI framework too? Actually yea, I think it’s all just a total coincidence and I don’t think there’s any chance that we’ll see even a hint of a brand new UI framework at this year’s conference. If it ever happens, which it may not, it’s still very likely to be many years away. 🙈

Dave Verwer

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News

The best thing I read this week was this piece by Craig Hockenberry. I’m going to butcher together a quote here which I think sums it up perfectly.

It’s likely that getting your iOS app to run on a Mac will just be a matter of flipping a switch in Xcode. It will be exciting for a lot of developers, including yours truly, to press that button. But it’s also important to temper this enthusiasm with reality: that build setting is just the first step on a long and complicated road. Good interaction doesn’t come for free.

I don’t necessarily agree 100% with is his thoughts on Universal apps, but everything else here is solid gold.

Of course this isn’t directly related to the App Store but there’s definitely lots of cross over with what’s being talked about here, and mobile games. This bill (and forgive me if I get anything wrong here, I know nothing about US law) is a long way from being approved, but if it is passed would probably end up being a net win for the App Store too. I believe that the popular business models in mobile games are bad for everyone in the long run.

Code

Following up on last week’s test harness app, Noah Gilmore put together a post on the same subject. I bet it will be useful if you’ve ever struggled with this problem. I know I have!

I really liked this article by Axel Kee because it’s a nice reminder of the power of an NSOperation subclass. That API has always been one of my favourites!

The opening statement in the README might not sound too exciting…

The iOS UI framework for building experiences for Office and Office 365.

But actually there’s plenty of components here that wouldn’t look out of place in any iOS app. There’s previews of what some of the controls look like over here too.

Finally, this post from Jordan Morgan starts with a deprecation warning from the iOS 12 SDK and ends with a journey into a more secure encoding format. It’s worth a read.

Design

I liked this article from Dmitriy Bunin on creating art with Sketch plugins. Often an interesting accident with a tool like some of the ones recommended here is all it takes to make a dull icon into something much more visually interesting. I had fun playing with a few of these.

Up to Speed

There are so many reasons to link to this app from Paul Hudson. Maybe you’ll install it to learn Swift. 🤯 Maybe you’ll install it for the iMessage stickers (yes, the iOS Dev Weekly logo is in there). Or, maybe you’d rather look through the source for the app itself, which is now relicensed. Whatever your reason, you know what to do.

Videos

App Builders really looked like a great conference this year. I wasn’t able to be there unfortunately but at least the videos are already up and available!

And finally...

This is the future…