Issue 433

6^th December 2019

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Last week I asked for your feedback on my draft list of questions for the iOS Developer Community Survey. Honestly, you blew me away by starting more than 300 comment threads and leaving almost 450 replies. That’s significantly more than I expected. I’m glad you’re as excited about this as I am. 🙌

So what was the feedback? Well… basically… you wanted to add even more questions! 😂 I’ve given a lot of thought to the length of the survey over the last week, and have decided to keep this as a really comprehensive survey. It’s a long questionnaire, and I know that will affect how many people actually fill it in. That said, I genuinely think it’s going to be more interesting to have a smaller number of responses to a significant survey, than a huge number of responses to a trivial one.

So, I’ve had a couple of people beta test it for me and it’s probably going to take you between 20 to 40 minutes (see the UPDATE below) to complete. You also need to finish it without closing the browser tab. It’s not a strenuous survey though, every question is optional and there are no free text questions at all.

UPDATE: It’s looking like it’s taking around 15-20 minutes on average! That’s great news. 👍

Asking for this much of your time isn’t something I do lightly. I really believe that this survey could be significant to the industry going forward, and this is your chance to get your views seen by the rest of the community, and even beyond that. For example, while Apple is not involved in this survey, I’m very confident that they’ll be watching the results carefully. Want them to listen? Isn’t answering some multiple-choice questions easier than filing radars? 😂

So, will you fill in the very first iOS Developer Community Survey? I’d love it if you would.

Dave Verwer

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News

I love seeing Apple highlight incredible apps and I think they did a great job with this year’s selection. You probably already saw the apps of the year, or the games of the year. But you may have missed the full list of developers that were included. Congratulations to them all! 😍

There are no surprises here, but it’s always worth a reminder. Make sure you’ve got everything wrapped up for the holidays before the 23rd December.

Tools

Did you know that Swift Package Manager packages could also include executables as well as libraries? Well, yes, you probably did… but do you know how to take advantage of those executables in your build process? I enjoyed this article from Tobeas Brennan and I love this feature of the SPM.

Vadim Shpakovski on the launch of his native iTunes Connect client. If you’re managing multiple apps and especially if you’re managing with multiple App Store accounts, this is going to deliver some huge time savings. The free version can also do plenty, so give it a try.

Talking of native tools, here’s Chris Davis on the launch of his new app Haptrix, a custom Core Haptics AHAP file editor. I’ve linked to a couple of AHAP tools (1, 2) over the last few months but they were both web-based, and isn’t native always better?

For full disclosure, Chris was kind enough to send me a review copy of the app.

Code

This piece from Robert Böhnke was the best thing I read this week. Are you familiar with the animation that happens when you tap and hold on a sticker in messages? If you like that, you’ll love this. Actually, even if you don’t like the animation you’ll still love this. 😍

I must admit when I started reading this post from Yono Mittlefehldt it was news to me that the Vision framework had saliency analysis APIs, and it turns out they’re pretty cool. While we’re on the subject, I also did a bit more investigation and found this in the official documentation which is also worth a read.

Yes, this article from Matthijs Hollemans is from back in July, but I’ve kept it in the queue here as it was the start of a four-part (1, 2, 3, 4) series that has been steadily arriving over the last few months. This is a fantastic set of posts on a topic from this year’s WWDC that I haven’t seen get much attention.

What started with a tweet, ended in this. A new library from Antoine van der Lee to quickly and easily get logs and other useful system information back from your users.

Jobs

Senior iOS Developer @ Karmarama – You’ll be empowered to architect and contribute to the development of innovative products for a wide range of exciting well-known brands. You will bring a wealth of iOS experience to the team, steering our architecture, open-source frameworks and evolving delivery allowing us to refine capabilities. – London UK

There may not have been a huge number of featured jobs this week but even though we’re closing in on the end of 2019, there are still more than 30 open positions listed on iOS Dev Jobs. What are you waiting for?

And finally...

Is this a bit like writing an app in SwiftUI this year? 😂