Help capture the latest iOS trends in 2015
News
Following last week’s fastlane announcement, this week brings more open source news with Capital One stepping up to sponsor development work on CocoaPods. Even better, the fact that it’s a simple sponsorship leaves me with no worries at all about implications for the future. Fantastic news, well done Capital One!
200MB Max, No Storage, No Web Views: is tvOS the Future of Apps?
Adam Fish with a run down on some of the limitations of the tvOS SDK. Some have been well publicised and won’t come as any shock, like no access to WebKit and only 200MB storage. However there are still some surprises here, like no easy customisation of the video player and no built in picture in picture functionality. Keep in mind that even though tvOS is built on iOS 9, this is still a version 1 and there’s plenty of time for improvement.
Tools
How to take a screenshot or record video on your Apple TV
Great tip by Serenity Caldwell on capturing both screenshots and video from the Apple TV. Turns out it’s exactly the same technique as it is on the iPhone but I’m pleased to see this made it in from the beginning. Super easy to take those promotional screenshots and videos. 👍
Generate Swift enums to remove your stringly typed code. I’ve linked to something like this before but this tool produces enums not only for storyboards and segues, but for images from asset catalogues, colours and localisable strings. Looks good.
Code
Working With Phone Numbers in Swift
Localising by adding new languages is all well and good, but for a really polished experience you’ll want to consider more than just the words. With this in mind, I really liked Roy Marmelstein’s article (and the associated library PhoneNumberKit) about parsing international phone numbers.
It’s not brand new but I came across this implementation of Reachability in Swift this week via Little Bites of Cocoa, which remains a fantastic resource. Anyway, if you’re looking for a modern way to keep up to date on the network status, this library by Ashley Mills looks good.
Considerations for Choosing 3rd Party Swift Libraries
There has been plenty written on this subject, but this week Andrew Bancroft summed up some of the pros and cons of bringing that shiny new library into your app. Mentioned in the article, but also deserving of a special mention, the CocoaPods quality index is a really quick way to see roughly what kind of shape a library is in before even considering it.
Design
I missed Part 1 of this article by Nick Keppol when it was published but this is certainly worth your time if you want the low down on the San Francisco font. So much thought went into how this font was going to be used, it’s amazing to look at the details.
Business and Marketing
This Is How You Design Your Mobile App for Maximum Growth
Great article with lots of useful information. I found the stats on how shorter on boarding screens increased sign up especially interesting as it goes against what you might have thought. As developers, we do have a tendency to over explain when people just want to get into the app. There’s also some good advice here about how to aim for steady growth, rather than a big spike. Worth a read.
Sr. Mobile App Developer @ CoStar Group | Apartments.com (Washington, D.C.)
Senior iOS Engineer - Harry’s, New York
iOS Developer at WillowTree - Charlottesville or Durham
And finally...
Forget the bugs in iOS, this is what needs fixing! Also, this reply is priceless.