Issue 489

Comment

Happy new year! I hope you all enjoyed a break from work over the holidays, I know I enjoyed some much-needed downtime (although I did use some of it to start writing a new app… Will I ever learn?! 😬). I also want to wish you all a healthy, successful, and happy 2021. Even though this year is starting in crisis, I’m confident things will improve.

At the end of last year, I wrote that I wouldn’t be running the community survey this year. To give it a chance of survival, I offered the opportunity for other members of the community to continue it, if anyone was interested. 👀

I’m delighted to say that Chris Hefferman and Dragos Dobrean stepped up and have been working hard for the last few weeks revising the questionnaire, fixing my mistakes, and adjusting the questions to be more relevant for 2020.

Just like last year, you won’t be asked to identify yourself and all responses are 100% anonymous, and this is still your survey which means you’ll have access to all of the aggregated results when they’re published.

As of earlier today, this year’s questionnaire is now open for responses, so what are you waiting for? Please spend a few minutes contributing to the 2020 iOS Developer Community Survey. I can’t wait to see how things have changed since last year.

News

Indie Dev Monday

I don't quite know how I've managed not to link to Josh Holtz's interview-based newsletter before, but let's fix that right now. Every Monday, you'll learn all about an independent iOS or macOS developer, and their apps. If you want to catch up with all of the issues so far, he recently published a review of the year that's well worth checking out.

Prepare for Strong Customer Authentication

If you don't live in Europe, or if most of your business happens in the USA, you may be unaware that there are new rules around credit card transactions. Apple has been good enough to publish a guide on what has changed, along with some help on how you can verify you're using StoreKit and/or Apple Pay correctly to make sure you don't lose payments!

Tools

Getting Started with Instruments

Has there ever been a more powerful, but under-utilised tool than Instruments? I think people are put off by how much it can do, and how little guidance there is on using it effectively. So, when I saw that Lea Marolt Sonnenschein had updated this tutorial, I couldn't help but link to it. It'll get you up to speed with several of the best ways to use this essential tool.

I also saw that Junda Ong wrote about three new Apple tech talks on Instruments recently too. I'm not sure when they were published, but you might want to watch them after finishing up the tutorial.

XcodeUpdates

Are you tired of having to navigate through to the “More Downloads" section of the Apple developer site every time there’s a new release of Xcode? Yes, you could be using xcode-install, but if you were looking for something a bit richer, this new tool from Ruslan Alikhamov might be more your style. It’s an open-source app, but you don’t have to build it yourself as there’s a pre-compiled version available.

Code

AutomaticSettings

This new library from Krzysztof Zabłocki is interesting. Define a Codable struct, and it’ll use Sourcery behind the scenes to automatically generate a SwiftUI settings view. The best way to see it in action is to watch the intro video, so you should start there.

Experimenting with Swift async and await

I’ve not looked at the upcoming support for async/await in Swift in any more detail than reading the proposals. It turns out that Rizwan Ahmed has, and here’s what he found. I’m really looking forward to this feature of Swift!

Understanding @inlinable

Bruno Rocha ends this post by saying:

I would strongly suggest for you to not use them unless you know what you're doing.

It's good advice. You almost certainly don't need this, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting to read about. It is! Just remember that before you start any optimisation work, the most important step is to profile before, and profile after! Don't just randomly include something "because it makes things faster".

Business and Marketing

Writing An App In 2 Days

I took an approach with Transparent App Icons that I hadn’t taken before - I tried to make the absolute minimum thing as fast as possible.

A fascinating look at modern marketing techniques from Noah Gilmore. This won’t work for every type of app, but it still makes for interesting reading.

Books

SwiftUI Projects

I really like the approach that Craig Clayton took with this book. Rather than systematically working through every API, or trying to bend a single application towards everything he wanted to cover, it builds six different apps, each demonstrating different concepts.

For full disclosure, Craig sent me over a copy of this book.

Jobs

Senior iOS Software Engineer @ Doximity and iOS Software Engineer @ Doximity – Doximity, the medical network used by over 70% of US clinicians, is hiring passionate 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! – Remote within the US

Senior iOS Developer @ Atomic Robot – Atomic Robot works with some of the most exciting companies and brands to help them bring their innovative projects to life! We have a highly collaborative team that is focused on high quality engineering and continuous learning. – Remote, or Cincinnati OH

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 through asking our candidates to complete paid projects, which largely resemble the type of challenges they would be solving at DuckDuckGo every day. – Remote

Mobile Full Stack Engineer @ Expensify – Join our passionate team of top-notch engineers to solve a real-world problem, and help people spend less time managing expenses and more time pursuing their real goals. As we revolutionize the way people manage their expenses, being part of the Expensify team means building the easiest, fastest, and most efficient platform to automate everything expense-related. – Remote, San Francisco CA, New York NY, Portland OR, or London UK

A couple of people contacted me recently asking how to list a job here. I should start telling people that! If you’d like to have your job listed here, post your job on iOS Dev Jobs! I include all featured listings in this newsletter.

And finally...

What I tried to do was make this program as faithful to the version in the movie as I possibly could.

Remarkable attention to detail in this fascinating video.

Issue 489 January 8th 2021