Issue 485

4^th December 2020

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

When you run your own business, the decision of how to spend your time is always tricky. When should you take on contract work, and when should you spend time working on something that’s less financially rewarding, but that you’re more passionate about? Our time is limited, and these decisions affect both our success and our happiness.

You also need to know when to give up on projects that haven’t been as successful as you hoped they would be, but that’s an even trickier decision! Has something not been successful because you didn’t push hard enough on it, or promote it correctly? Or was it because not all ideas are good ideas, and it was never going to be successful?

You won’t be surprised to hear that I’m not talking about a hypothetical decision and that I’m about to retire one of my projects. Which one? The iOS Developer Community Survey.

I had great hopes for this project. I thought it’d be a valuable resource for this community, without the data being owned by a company that was trying to prove some hypothesis for a marketing campaign. I also thought it would put to rest some of the misinformation about how our community feels about the industry. It was intended to show the views of the whole community, rather than the view of people with a popular newsletter, podcast, or with lots of Twitter followers.

The data collection was successful, with over 2,000 people spending a significant amount of time filling in the survey. But the results site that reported the data was not successful at all! It got a spike of traffic when I launched it, but no one was talking about it or visiting the site unless I linked to it. I had even sold advertising on the pages, believing it would be successful! 😬 I did, of course, fully compensate the advertisers for the money they paid, so it did not cost them anything (or ruin my reputation).

I fully intended to continue the survey for at least one more year before calling it a failure, to see if it needed a couple of years to get popular. However, as I started to think about how much my time it would need, and what else I could be spending that time on instead, I concluded that the survey would need to be a snapshot in time, rather than an ongoing resource.

I’m not sad about this decision. It’s OK to fail, and I’m still proud of the work I did last year. This is just one of those situations where I have to choose what to work on, and this didn’t make the cut.

One last thing before we get into this week’s links. If you’re interested in carrying on the project, I’d still love to see it thrive in the future. Reply to this or message me on Twitter and we can chat about it. I’ll provide all the sources, data, and will help to promote it.

Dave Verwer

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News

If you’d like to take advantage of the reduced revenue share of the App Store Small Business Program, now is the time to get your application submitted! What are you waiting for?

James Dempsey with a new site that answers the age-old question of “What version of Xcode should I install if I need Swift 5.1?” This would have been a really useful resource to have while building this!

Tools

Is this new tool from Nick Lockwood the greatest utility in the world, or is it just a … 😂 I was a big fan of how CocoaPods made it easy to keep your open-source attributions in order, but this tool isn’t tied to a specific dependency manager.

Note: This won’t work with projects that use Swift Package Manager yet as it scans for LICENSE files inside the project directory, and SPM caches dependencies outside that directory by default.

Update: Nick just contacted me to let me know he pushed a fix that should let this work with projects that use SPM too! That’s what I call a quick response. Thanks Nick!

There have been many ways to integrate with Interface Builder (yes, I still call it that 🙈) over the years, ranging from the constant frustration of ibplugin modules, through to the more recent @IBDesignable and @IBInspectable properties. Interface Builder is replaced with Xcode Previews for SwiftUI, but you can still integrate your own views alongside the system ones in Xcode 12. Keith Harrison explains.

Code

How does the SwiftUI layout system go about dealing with grids? It seems like that should be quite a simple task, but there are some subtleties that Florian Kugler is here to teach us about.

Naturally, SwiftUI manages focus automatically for things like text fields, buttons, lists, and similar. But what happens when you want to make a custom view focusable? Majid Jabrayilov shows us how.

I love the idea of the limited photo library API that iOS 14 introduced. Unfortunately, it’s easy to make a pretty terrible user experience with it, partly because the API is quite limited, and partly because the feature is turned on regardless of whether your app has declared support for it. Learn how to do it right with Andy Ibanez.

This is a smart tip from John Sundell.

Videos

Isn’t refactoring just about renaming methods? 😂 Let’s wrap up this week’s links with a video from Jon Reid talking on refactoring at Cocoaheads NL recently.

Jobs

iOS Swift & iOS QA Engineer @ Redzone Production Systems – Redzone is looking to hire talented Engineers to join our team. We build a communication and collaboration platform that enables frontline workers to resolve day-to-day production issues themselves before they become problems. (iOS, Swift, Scala, AWS, Kubernetes) – Remote, Miami FL, or Birmingham UK

Senior iOS Engineer @ Branch – Want to build transparent and honest financial services that help working Americans grow? Come join us! – Remote within the US

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

And finally...

How would you sort an array of numbers, if performance didn’t matter? 😂