Contact Details Required for the The Korean App Store
You will already be aware of this if you tried to set an app live this week like we did. Contact details for a "trade representative" must now be present for the Korean App Store before any new apps or updates can go live. If you work for, or with, a larger company then it might take a few days to get this information sorted out so get it done now before this holds up your next release. A little notice would have been nice!
The Secret Feature of iOS Spotlight Search For App Marketers
I wasn't aware that the App Store title was searched by spotlight before reading this article by Alex Klein. You might want to think about adding some keywords to your App Store title with your next release. I wonder if Apple will ever add App Store search results to spotlight like this? Obviously installed apps would be listed first but imagine if you searched in spotlight for an app and listed below the apps already on the device were links to apps that you had not yet installed.
Optimizing Your Industry to the Point of Suicide
Thomas Baekdal with a blunt look at the state of freemium on the App Store. There is nothing wrong with freemium in itself and clearly this model is working right now (the worst offenders come straight out of the top grossing chart) but I do feel there has to be a backlash from users at some point. It feels like annoying users is this year's business model, but probably isn't next year's. I'm sure Freemium will still feature strongly for a long time to come but it's time to get back to making games fun rather than annoying.
Where Apple design is headed in 2014
iOS 7 may still feel shiny and new but it's easy to forget that we only have a few months until we get a peek at what's coming next. Dave Wiskus takes a look at possible directions for iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 (or OS XI?) and speculates on possible directions. I think we can all agree with Dave that Apple will be very likely to move back to its usual format of incremental design upgrades with iOS but is it OS X's turn for a more major change this year?
Hello everyone. You may remember a few weeks ago that I opened up a writing position here on iOS Dev Weekly. Well, after a fantastic initial response, I've narrowed the field down to 4 people, and they are each going to write a guest issue over the next few weeks.
First up is Evan Dekhayser who has been working with iOS since 2013 and has been writing about it for most of that time too! He's a writer for raywenderlich.com, co-author of two iOS books and also has his own blog.
I'll hand you over to Evan now!
AsyncDisplayKit is moved and rebranded as Texture
AsyncDisplayKit was created by Facebook and it was one of the many iOS open source frameworks which resulted from Paper (remember that?). Over the years, Pinterest contributed more and more to it, until this week they officially took over the project and moved it to a new home. Not much has changed yet in terms of using the framework, but big and probably breaking changes have been announced for the next major release. Personally, I'm curious to see what's going to happen to the more than 150 issues open on the old repo. 🙃
Converting closure-based code into async/await in Swift
I liked this article from Andy Ibanez that goes beyond the basics of async/await and into a task that we're all going to be doing a lot of over the next few years, converting lots of closures (and maybe delegates too) into the modern syntax.
Note: Andy mentions this in the article, but I think it's worth emphasising again. You should think carefully about refactoring working code to use a new API or language feature unless there's a really good reason to do so. Everything in your codebase doesn't need to be bang up to date.
This new app from Alexandre Colucci will visualise your app's class dependencies and complexity. What does that mean? You'll want to check out the details of the software entropy algorithm to learn a bit more about what this does, and how it works, but if you work on a large project, it's likely to prove interesting. The next question, of course, is what do you do about the results... 😬
For full disclosure, Alexandre sent me a promo code for the finished version of the app, and I also received beta builds during its development.
I still have the first book on Mac programming that I ever read sitting on the bookshelf next to me. It’s hard to describe how much has changed since then. AppKit has had too many improvements to count, and that’s before we even consider Swift and SwiftUI!
This new book from Sarah Reichelt will help you get to grips with Mac development, and you’ll build four apps while you read it using a combination of SwiftUI and AppKit. That should get you up to speed!
For full disclosure, I received access to this book for free.
It’s been a few weeks since the Swift project’s website became open-source. In that announcement, Tom Doron said that one of the first steps would be establishing a working group, and here he is again announcing the formation of that working group!
What’s that? Why is my name on that list? Yes, I applied to the group, and I’m delighted to say that I will be a part of the workgroup. I hope to contribute what I can to improve the site over the next couple of years!