Issue 422

20^th September 2019

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

We’ve got new phones in our hands, watches on our wrists, and a second release of the Xcode 11 GM seed on our hard drives that fixes the asset catalog bug. Does September get any better than this?

Actually, it probably does as it’s only 4 days until 13.1 arrives! 👍

Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

Vettery specializes in developer roles and is completely free for job seekers. Interested? Submit your profile, and if accepted, you can receive interview requests directly from top companies growing their mobile dev teams. Get Started.

News

It’s good to see Apple being reasonable and rolling back slightly on some of these guidelines. The one you’re most likely to be affected by here is the amendments to “Sign in with Apple”. Nothing huge is changing, you still have to implement it if you are using other “Sign in with …” buttons, but some edge cases are now being coped with.

Tools

Yes, this information is available in the documentation, but there’s absolutely no substitute for seeing how size classes, layout margins, safe areas, context menus, navigation/split views and so many more things work on real devices. Geoff Hackworth has updated his Adaptivity app for iOS 13 and it’s just as good as ever.

Tweak a parameter, build and run, tweak a parameter, build and run, tweak, run, tweak, run… If you’ve ever used anything more than a very basic particle emitter in your project then that cycle is going to sound very familiar. Luckily Besher Al Maleh has put together this extremely comprehensive settings explorer for CAEmitterLayer and friends. There’s also more information in this blog post if you’d like a bit of background.

I had missed that Xcode 11 had added support for iOS 11’s layout guides, but then I read this post from Keith Harrison and he put me straight! 👍 You should read it too.

Code

Don’t get too distracted by the slightly obtuse opening paragraphs in Mattt’s latest NSHipster article, there’s some very important information here. Also, be aware that you’ll only see this behaviour when you build with Xcode 11. If you use push notifications, you want to read this.

I linked to this before, but since Paul Hudson has been through it and updated every bit of it for the Xcode 11 GM seed, and also recorded a whole new set of 14 videos to go alongside it, it’s worth another look. There’s so much broken SwiftUI content out there due to the constant changes this summer, it’s nice to know that everything here is going to work with the released version of Xcode.

I linked to the news about the subscription grace period last week, but didn’t offer any advice on how to deal with it. Here’s Jacob Eiting with exactly what you need to do.

Great article from Danny Bolella on the much simplified view lifecycle in SwiftUI. He argues (and I agree) that Apple don’t want you to think about the lifecycle much because it’s much less important now that data is bound automatically to views. 👍

It may seem like the new design for UISegmentedControl is just a straight drop in replacement for the old class, and if you’re not customising anything then you’re right! However, Rostyslav Dovhaliuk is here with a great little article on some of the edge cases you might want to keep in mind if you’re using this class.

Videos

There’s conference talks, meetup talks, and presentations of all kinds covering iOS development here. List talks by year, by conference or just search for something specific.

This site, put together by Khoa Pham isn’t new, but it’s a complete re-design and it’s much faster and nicer to use than the old version. 👍

Jobs

iOS Developer (f/m/x) @ COBI.Bike GmbH – We offer you a great team, great e-bikes you can try out, a beautiful office, newest apple hardware so you can make the magic and happen and the chance to develop your skills further. We’re amazing! Join us! – Frankfurt, Germany

Swift Engineer @ WillowTree – At WillowTree, Swift Engineers have the freedom to create products people love. You’ll collaborate with a cross-disciplinary team to build large-scale products for well-known brands. We look for team members who advocate for software engineering best practices and inspire their team to continuously learn and improve. – Charlottesville, VA

Senior iOS Developer @ Albus – Join us to work on modern apps (Swift and iOS 12 minimum) used by thousands of medical professionals everyday. Our management is composed of mobile experts whose product’s vision takes the technical aspects in consideration. Your voice will be heard at every step (technical, UX, design…). Get the best of both worlds by working in a small modern team inside a stable and growing company. – Nantes, France

Lead Application Engineer @ LiveSurface – Build the next generation of LiveSurface products with a focus on SwiftUI, Combine and the newest Apple frameworks. LiveSurface is an industry leader in visualization and image creation tools for creatives. We blend clean UX, proprietary rendering technology and hand-curated content to provide realtime photorealistic visualization to our users. – Remote

Senior iOS Engineer @ Fi – Fi is reinventing the relationship between dogs and their humans by providing dogs more freedom and their owners peace of mind through the Fi Smart Dog Collar. We’re working hard to push pet tech forward by building amazing hardware and software, all in a dog friendly office. Come join our veteran team that hails from Nest, Square, Google, MakerBot, FourSquare, and Canary. – New York, NY

Are you looking for a job? Check out the full list of over 40 open positions on iOS Dev Jobs.

And finally...

This may have been inspired by what the Xcode team were saying when they realised they needed a second GM seed of Xcode 11! 😂