Issue 484

Comment

There’s no long introductory comment this week. Instead, I’m going to start by wishing those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday a happy one! I hope you managed to make the best of what must have been an unusual day, given the circumstances. I hope you all managed to celebrate the good things in your lives. 🦃

To those of you who didn’t celebrate it, I hope you had a great Thursday!

News

Comparing iPhone OS 1.0 with iOS 14 using tree maps

Alexandre Colucci is at it again, this time with a great visualisation of what types of files make up iOS releases over the years. As many people have noticed, it's striking how much of iOS 1 was font files, but I think it's equally fascinating the size of the private frameworks section in iOS 14 compared to the public ones! This should keep you entertained as you reach for another Thanksgiving treat.

Black Friday Deals

It's becoming a tradition that I link to Marius Landwehr's annual round-up of Black Friday deals, and this year is no different! If you're looking to spend some money on the most commercial day of the year, feast your eyes. Or, check out Bryan Dubno's list of indie apps that are on sale. With a bit of luck, these two lists could combine for next year, so we all know exactly where to go to spend all our money!

App privacy questions requirement starts December 8

One final warning from Apple. Are you ready? This is less than two weeks away.

Tools

ConnectKit for Shortcuts

"Hey Siri. Submit my app to the App Store"

How would you feel about being able to interact with the App Store Connect API via Siri? There's more detail in the launch blog post, but the long and short of this new app from Josh Holtz is that it lets you automate the API with Shortcuts. How did Josh get so much experience with the App Store Connect API? I have no idea.

SF Symbols Changes in iOS 14.2

There are new SF Symbols! More than 40 new glyphs, making more than 2,600 in total. 🎉 As Geoff Hackworth points out in this article, unfortunately, it's a little difficult to see what's new in the official app. However, if you've got his Adaptivity app, he's made a view in it to highlight just the new symbols.

Code

A Companion for SwiftUI

I first linked to Javier Nigro's excellent app back in Issue 429, so why am I linking it again? Simple, it's just been given a huge update with over 260 new entries covering everything from this year's SwiftUI release. It's a truly worthwhile purchase.

I also mentioned this last time, but for continued full disclosure, I was sent a copy of this app when it first released a year ago.

New UIDatePicker Styles in iOS 14

Every time I work with dates and times, I'm tempted to underestimate the edge cases. 😅 There are a plethora of open-source calendar-style date picker controls available. Still, I was happy to see Apple tackle the problem in this year's iOS release with UIDatePicker. I'm confident that Apple has thought about the edge cases in a way that most open-source projects couldn't. Let's get up to speed with what's new by reading this post from Mark Thormann, shall we?

What went wrong with the libdispatch?

This post from Thomas Clement got a fair bit of discussion on Twitter this week, and it's definitely worth a read. If I had to summarise the post, I'd say:

Concurrent programming is hard. It has always been hard and probably always will be. Libdispatch promised to make asynchronous programming easier, and it's a step forward if used carefully, but can also become an extra length of rope. There are new Swift concurrency APIs in development, and as with every technology that doesn't exist, they look shiny and perfect right now, but they will still be a length of rope if used without care. We will always need to think carefully about concurrency.

Did I get it? 🤩

iOS Apps on M1 Macs

I was so happy to see Ryan Ashcraft tackle this subject. If you have an iOS app in the store, you can enable it to run on macOS without making any changes, but should you? Not before you give it a test and find the inevitable bugs that will come with running an app on a platform it wasn't designed for. Ryan goes through the issues he found in his app FoodNoms.

Custom UIStackView spacing

How on earth did I not know about this! Sarun Wongpatcharapakorn blew my mind with this tip. 🤯

Business and Marketing

How to pitch your app to a journalist

Oliver Haslam of iMore tweeted out a call to developers this week, but it was this follow up from Charlie Chapman that brought out this 240 character gem on how to write an effective pitch email about a new app release. I also liked Craig Grannell's post on the same subject that he linked in the thread.

Books

Working with Data in SwiftUI

This new book from Mark Moeykens is all about @State, @Binding, @ObservedObject, @AppStorage, @SceneStorage, and many other data related techniques in SwiftUI! I really like Mark's style of teaching. The best way I can describe it is that it's like looking at a really information-dense Keynote presentation. The book stops short of talking about Core Data, but I did notice that Core Data by Tutorials had an update this week if that's what you're looking for.

For full disclosure, Mark kindly provided me with a copy of this book.

Jobs

Senior iOS Engineer @ Runtastic – Contribute to our mission of changing the world through sport! Join the Runtastic team and support hundreds of millions of users in the adidas Running and adidas Training apps as they progress along their fitness journey. We’re currently looking for Senior iOS Engineers to join squads focusing on connecting millions of users through engaging social features or building our CRM core capabilities. – Austria

Senior Mobile Software Engineer, iOS – Doximity, the medical network used by over 70% of US clinicians, is hiring passionate Senior iOS engineers (remote-friendly!). You'll get to be part of an amazing product team and work on an app that is constantly evolving. Use your skills (Swift, MVVM, FRP) to be an integral part of our newly launched telemedicine feature. Apply today! – San Francisco CA, or Remote within the US

Senior iOS Engineer @ DuckDuckGo and Senior macOS Engineer @ DuckDuckGo – Rather than rely on interviews, we base our hiring decisions on demonstrable work performance. We achieve that by asking our candidates to complete paid projects, which largely resemble the type of challenges they would be solving at DuckDuckGo every day. – Remote

And finally...

This is the best request for a new work machine that I've ever seen. 😆

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Issue 484 November 27th 2020