Issue 526

24^th September 2021

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Thanks so much to the 1,358 (!) of you who took the time to fill in last week’s mini-survey on remote work. I appreciate your time.

It’s safe to say that most people are looking for primarily remote work but still value meeting your colleagues in person once or twice a year. But it’s not quite that simple.

Firstly, almost 8% of people are looking for remote work that is “Strictly remote, with no requirement to travel anywhere or meet face-to-face for any reason”, and nothing else. Even a once or twice yearly meet-up would rule a job out. That’s an astoundingly high percentage for such a strict definition of remote work.

However, consider this before you get carried away and cancel all of your “all hands” gatherings for 2022. Almost 40% of people said that a strictly remote position without any meet-ups would rule out a job for them, meaning a large majority of people don’t want an utterly isolated work life. That makes things complicated! 😬

Then, I found something extraordinary that I can’t explain. In addition to asking what kind of remote work people wanted themselves, I asked for a definition. I expected everyone to define “Strictly remote, with no requirement to travel anywhere or meet face-to-face for any reason” as remote work, but that didn’t happen. Over 21% of people who defined one of the other options as remote, said that the “Strictly remote” description was not remote work. 😱 Now, that sentence is clearly within the definition of remote work, so my initial thought was to ignore some bad data, but I couldn’t ignore 21%.

If I had to guess, I think people are trying to say is that they feel strongly that even fully remote work benefits from some amount of in-person contact. That’s a guess, though, and I’m curious to know why people answered that way, so if you were one of the 289 people who would not define my “Strictly remote” description as remote work, drop me a reply and let me know what you meant! I’d love to know.

Of course, you can see a complete summary of the results, including the answers to the other questions I didn’t discuss here.

If I had to draw only one conclusion from this data, it would be that the most important part of your company’s remote work policy should be flexibility. Everyone is unique and wants or needs different things, even within the definition of “remote” work.

Dave Verwer

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News

What would an App Store look like if it focused on apps by independent developers? Filip Nemecek shows us! What a great idea. Of course, this would be better as an app itself, but the guidelines would get in the way of that plan, but a web version is better than nothing!

Here’s Ted Kremenek with the official release announcement for Swift 5.5, which is, of course, the version shipping with Xcode 13. The main features are all based around concurrency (and limited to an iOS 15/Monterey runtime environment), but you may find a couple of new things in the list!

Tools

When Xcode’s editor can understand the Swift code you’ve written, the code completion and syntax highlighting have taken some great steps forward in this year’s release! Unfortunately, if your code is anything like mine, Xcode won’t understand it very often! 😂 Here’s Batıkan Sosun with a look at the new code completion and a couple of new preferences, too!

Here’s Jason Zurita with a two-part guide to perfectly formatted Swift code. First, he explains why you’d want to tackle the issue and then follows it up with a guide to SwiftLint, SwiftFormat, Danger, and other tools!

Code

I’ve enjoyed Kamil Tustanowski’s recent series on using the Vision framework to detect everything from barcodes through animals to body poses! I wish I could show my 12-year-old self this technology. I would not have believed it!

I’ve never been a big fan of disclosure/drop-down UI in iPhone apps. I feel that navigation is almost always a better fit. Of course, SwiftUI is not just for iPhone apps, so go crazy with DisclosureGroup, the API that gives you all the collapsable disclosure goodness you could ever want! Gabriel Theodoropoulos tells us all about it.

I loved this piece from Daniel Saidi on how he decides whether to open-source code, which pieces to open-source and how to execute on it in the best way. He’s talking from experience, too!

Business and Marketing

This is a brilliant idea from Ben Harraway. Read the thread for some doubts about App Review guidelines about this, but it looks like it made it through! This technique is going to work better for some apps than others, but I love the idea.

Thanks Drew McCormack, this is good to hear. 🚀 Interesting discussion in the thread here, and in the thread of Matt Ronge’s original tweet

Jobs

Senior iOS Software Engineer @ Dance – Working with exceptional people on an ambitious mission to have a positive impact on the environment. No legacy code or technical debt, just an exciting roadmap, modern technology and the opportunity to take real ownership. – Remote (within European timezones)

iOS Experienced Engineer @ Bloomberg LP – Join our group of mobile engineers at Bloomberg who build the definitive financial market mobile experience. With new projects on the horizon and opportunities for both technical specialists and those looking to progress into team leadership, this is your chance to make an impact. – On-site (United Kingdom) with some remote work (within European timezones)

Senior Software Engineer @ Frontier Design Group – We make the iOS app Video Star. We emphasize flexibility, personal responsibility, and good team communications, and try to minimize meetings and overhead. Our team has 10 full-time members plus part-timers, most based in Northern New England, USA, with others in Texas, Spain, China, and Brazil. – Remote (Anywhere)

iOS Engineer (US Remote) @ Karbon – Fully remote since day one, Karbon has spent the past 12 years building amazing apps for the best clients in the world. We’re a small, closely-knit team of iOS and Android engineers with an obsessive attention to detail. We value quality over quantity and focus on only a few key projects per year. – Remote (within US timezones)

Senior Remote iOS Native Engineer @ MartianCraft – MartianCraft has been making Mac and later iOS software for discerning clients for nearly two decades. Our team of in house engineers and designers is second to none. As a full-time remote company for more than a decade we understand the needs, requirements, and pitfalls of working remotely. – Remote (within US timezones)

iOS Engineer - Multiple Levels @ Turo – Help us build product features that delight guests who book vehicles on our platform & enable hosts with the tools they need to manage their fleet. We’re actively transitioning our codebase from Objective-C to Swift, and learning SwiftUI together as we migrate our internal, watchOS, and tvOS apps. – On-site (United States in CA)

Lead iOS Developer @ Loop – If you care about mental health, we are working on something very new and different in the field. What started late last year as a platform for on-demand support groups, has turned into a new type of highly affordable solution focused on those with moderate to severe Social Anxiety. – Remote (within US timezones)

Are you hiring? You can post your open positions for free over at iOS Dev Jobs.

And finally...

Want to know how to get your new apps linked in the “And finally…”?

Just be this extra with your launch announcement. Absolutely incredible work, it must have taken hours! 😂

Congratulations on the release of Amplosion and Achoo. I bought them both! 🚀