Issue 464

10^th July 2020

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Every day is a great day to remove (or advocate for the removal of) the Facebook SDK from your apps, but today is an especially… great… day… 🙄 How many times will Facebook get away with causing half the apps in the App Store to crash on startup? I linked to this post by Gui Rambo the last time this happened, but it’s worth reading again.

It might also be a good day to notice which apps are not crashing today and purchase an IAP or subscription from those developers. ❤️

Dave Verwer

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Tools

The bigger the project you work on, the more stuff it’s probably doing in “Run Script” build phases. It doesn’t matter how quick your compiles are if there’s then a 45-second script that follows every successful build. Noah Gilmore has a bit of good news about Xcode 12 for you!

A very nice new feature in this year’s Xcode is the ability for Playgrounds to easily use Swift Package Manager dependencies, as long as they’re on your local disk. There’s no way to trick Xcode into using a remotely hosted package, is there? Erica Sadun has a clever little trick. 🤯

Code

Is crash reporting on your mind today? 😬 It might be a good time to read Matt Massicotte’s thoughts on crash reporting in iOS 14 with MetricKit. There are some problems, but what he found is promising. He’s also working on a companion library, Meter.

I saw this useful diagram by Chris Eidhof at the start of this week and knew straight away that I’d want to link to it. It’s a great way to figure out which of the many state property wrappers are best for each situation. I thought Chris might blog about it, but instead, Donny Wals took up the challenge and created a whole new web site dedicated to the subject, featuring the diagram right at the top. It’s also worth watching the excellent WWDC video on Data Essentials.

But that’s not all! John Sundell wrote on the same subject this week, as did Majid Jabrayilov and Daniel Steinberg drew some conclusions too. What do they say? Great minds think alike!

This year’s new hotness in UICollectionView this year is… table views! I’m not sure Apple would ever truly deprecate UITableView, but this is a good sign of where UIKit list-style UI is heading. Let Keith Harrison show you around what’s new. The official WWDC video on this is also well worth watching.

Design

It’s likely you will already have seen this post from Michael Flarup (seriously, 1.5 million views in 24 hours?! 👏) but I just have to link to it as I agree with every word in it. Big Sur is beautiful and shows such promise for the future of software design across all Apple platforms.

Business and Marketing

Here’s Ryan Ashcraft with a great post looking back on a year of independent development. Food Noms is a fantastic app that I’ve been a fan of since the beta. It’s worth reading every word of this retrospective if you’re an indie developer, or have dreams of becoming one!

Videos

Are there lots of changes to unit testing in this year’s release of Xcode? Yes! Certainly, enough for Jon Reid to fill a 16-minute video with a comprehensive look at the improvements. 👍

Jobs

iOS Software Engineer @ Perry Street Software – Perry Street Software is Jack’d and SCRUFF. We are two of the world’s largest gay, bi, trans and queer social dating apps on iOS. Our brands reach more than 20+ million members worldwide so members can connect, meet and express themselves on a platform that prioritizes privacy and security. We are a small, agile, nimble company, so the ability to make an impact is significant. – Remote, or New York NY

And finally...

Just think about what could have been… 🤔