Today, I’m excited to announce updates to our guides to Swift Codable and Numbers, as well as a brand new Guide to Swift Strings. Everything is up-to-date with the latest from Swift 5 and Xcode 10.2, and now — for the first time — available in print! If you dig NSHipster, you’ll love Flight School. Amazing cover design! I love it when the cover of a book makes you want to read it.
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What’s cool about this is it’s not a proxy, so you don’t have to futz with certificates, proxy settings, and the like. As long as the iOS device and your Mac are on the same local network, you can view the network traffic of your apps.
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Federico Viticci on MacStories didn’t understand why Apple Music doesn’t offer a “Year in Review” feature, so he built his own: But Apple doesn’t seem interested in adding this feature to Apple Music, so I decided to build my own using Shortcuts. The result is the most complex shortcut I’ve ever created comprising over 540 actions. I just tried out the shortcut last night, and it’s incredible. But as Federico himself points out, doing something this complex pushes the boundaries of Shortcuts and iOS: Apple Music Wrapped pushes the limits of what is possible to achieve with the ‘Find Music Where…’ and ‘Open URLs’ actions of the Shortcuts app. In the past few weeks, I (and other testers) have run into limitations and inconsistencies worth pointing out both for MacStories readers and Shortcuts engineers at Apple. It’s nothing short of a programmatic feat, and if you use Apple Music, I recommend you give it a shot.
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Mattt over at NSHipster explains two important abstractions on Apple platforms: bundles and packages. Despite being distinct concepts, the terms “bundle” and “package” are frequently used interchangeably. Part of this is undoubtedly due to their similar names, but perhaps the main source of confusion is that many bundles just so happen to be packages (and vice versa). So before we go any further, let’s define our terminology: …
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Whether you are writing yet another one task tracker or calendar app, or simply want to offer the users to skip the joy of using UIDatePicker and let them quickly and efficiently select dates — CrispyCalendar is the calendar UI framework you need.
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Mobile apps were one of the big discussion points when we talked Mastodon on episode #315 of The Changelog. Here’s one thing Eugen had to say about the subject: Oh, yeah, for some reason I get a lot of questions like “Why isn’t Mastodon on the app store?” and it’s really weird, because there are like a million apps for Mastodon on every app store… They’re just not called Mastodon, because they are developed by third-party developers. Mastodon has a principle - API first, and… Yeah, that’s essentially it - API first. [laughter] Add Mast to the ever-growing list of third-party developers making iOS apps for Mastodon.
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If this book intrigues you (like it does me), start nowhere else but the “How to Read This Book”: A successful iOS game makes $4,000 annually (this goes for any app frankly). A successful Android game makes one seventh of that (one third at best). You are not a large multi-million dollar company (at least I don’t think you are given that you’re reading this book). So you don’t have the customer acquisition/marketing budget to beat this $4,000 annual average. Period. Brutal. What’s a dev to do, then? Make lots of niche, high quality games.
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Lyndsey Ferguson: Unit testing and the tests themselves are written by humans. Humans are prone to error. Unit tests and the testing infrastructure can be imperfect. The test_center plugin includes tools that remove (or alleviate) the effects of an imperfect test infrastructure. (fastlane is a popular way to automate building/releasing iOS and Android apps.)
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Want developers of great software to be able to make a living doing it? Want free trials in the App Store? Join The Developers Union! Dear Apple, We believe that people who create great software should be able to make a living doing it. So we created The Developers Union to advocate for sustainability in the App Store. Today, we are asking Apple to publicly commit — by the tenth anniversary of the App Store this July — to allowing free trials for all apps in the App Stores before July 2019. After that, we’ll start advocating for a more reasonable revenue cut and other community-driven, developer-friendly changes.
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Feeling nostalgic for Windows 95? Blake Tsuzaki was: This is a little exploration into applying ’90s-era design & principles into a modern platform with some primitive components. The assets and design metrics were (for the most part) taken from an actual installation of Windows 95. You may be wondering why all the effort? You’ll find answers to that question and more in the README.
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Peder Norrby created TheParallaxView, a UI experiment for his iPhone X, that gives it a trompe-l’oeil effect. Trompe-l’oeil is an age-old trick used by painters to create the illusion of 3D depth on a 2D plane. On the iPhone X, it’s downright mesmerizing. The touchscreen itself seems to melt away as the phone transforms into a portal to an infinite abyss. Angle the phone, or your own head, and you can even peek inside, as if you’re looking through a peephole into another room, or inspecting a can of Pringles for the last few crumbs. The source is on GitHub — plus check out this blog post and this Twitter thread for more of the backstory.
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This is being called “the biggest leak in history”, which is probably not true (remember when Gizmodo got its grubby paws on the iPhone 4?). But it’s likely the biggest leak in Apple software history. Motherboard says it… could pave the way for hackers and security researchers to find vulnerabilities in iOS and make iPhone jailbreaks easier to achieve. That’s plausible. iBoot is responsible for ensuring a trusted boot of the O/S. The specific version posted was from iOS 9, but this portion of code probably doesn’t get updated as often as the Music app, so it’s likely still relevant. Apple promptly posted a DMCA takedown request, and the source code is no longer publicly available. But we developers know all to well that once source code is made public, there’s no taking it private again.
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This article isn’t a how-to, per se. It’s more like a research report written after attempting to build such an app for the first time. There’s nothing wrong with that, though, and this write-up is super useful if you’re about to tackle a similar problem space. Open source libraries are tried, facial recognition services are evaluated, and their takeaways are solid, if not a bit disappointing. As you can see, the really simple idea of using facial recognition functionality was not that simple to implement. The entire piece is worth a read.
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Bender allows you to easily define and run neural networks on your iOS apps, it uses Apple’s MetalPerformanceShaders under the hood. Click through for some examples and an explanation of why they don’t use CoreML.
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Mozilla recently announced that they're finally bringing Firefox to iOS. They'll have to use iOS's built-in rendering engine like everybody else, which begs the question: What makes this Firefox? Time will tell whether they're too late to the game or not. In the meantime, the source code is freely available (and under heavy development). From the README: This is a work in progress on some early ideas. Don't get too attached to this code. Tomorrow everything will be different. Could be a fun project to track, especially if you're interested in Swift.
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Frameless for iOS 8 is the browser that gets out of your way. Frameless boasts a transparent UI, customizable gestures, and is built specifically for prototyping. Source here.
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Bryan Irace and fellow iOS developers at Tumblr launched cocoa.tumblr.com to chronicle the fun (and sometimes not fun) parts of building iOS and OS X applications. They also started the @cocoatumblr Twitter account so you can follow along on Twitter as well.
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What good is a browser that doesn’t have <div>s, <table>s, or <form>s? A lot of good if you want to build HTML5 games for iOS that are App Store compatible and quite performant.
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Overshare looks like a great solution to the common need of iOS apps to share their content with 3rd parties. It boasts: Beautiful share sheets with pixel-perfect, full-color icons in a simple layout. Built-in integration with iOS Twitter and Facebook accounts. Built-in integration with popular third-party services like App.net, Instapaper, and more. And much more.
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Apple’s Quartz Composer has enjoyed renewed enthusiasm as a prototyping tool after recent news and video tutorials on how Facebook prototyped Home using the tool. Joris Kluivers takes QC-based prototyping for iOS one step further with qc-mobile, which makes it possible to load, display, and interact with .qtz files on iOS. It’s still early days for the project (as Joris explains in his introductory blog post), but it is functional enough to render Jay Thrash’s iMessage recreation as seen in the demo video below. Now is a great time to get involved and make significant contributions to the project! qc-mobile is MIT licensed and hosted on GitHub.
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If you’re a fan of Facebook 6.0 with Chat Heads you’re gonna love this. This project is an attempt to re-implement this feature and to figure out how the animations are done. I don't support this project in a way to completely implement all features of ChatHeads. It should only illustrate how parts of ChatHeads are done. Yours truly even has a commit. Sure, it’s just a spelling change, but that’s all it takes. Check out the source on GitHub. ht/ @Soffes
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Today, the always-impressive Mattt released a new project: Helios. Helios is an open-source framework that provides essential backend services for iOS apps, from data synchronization and user accounts to push notifications, in-app purchases, and passbook integration. It allows developers to get a client-server app up-and-running in just a few minutes, and seamlessly incorporate functionality as necessary. Getting started is easy: $ gem install helios $ helios new myapp $ cd myapp; helios server $ open http://localhost:5000/admin Helios is broken down into useful components, too. If you check out the .gemspec, you’ll notice a few other gems that would be useful for anyone trying to build a backend service. There’s a lot of startups that do “Backend as a Service,” such as Parse, so it’s nice to see an OSS competitor pop up.
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Bryan Irace, iOS developer at Tumblr, announced in this post that Tumblr recently open-sourced their SDK for iOS as well as a few official client libraries for the Tumblr API. We've been using this SDK in production for quite some time now and are thrilled to finally be able to share it with you. If you’re interested in integrating with Tumblr on iOS or OS X in a way that the SDK doesn’t currently facilitate, please get in touch. I’m very interested in hearing any and all feedback on how we can make this as easy as possible. Keep an eye on Tumblr’s org on GitHub if you’re looking to integrate with the Tumblr API.
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Last week on episode #39 of The Industry, my buddy Drew Wilson mentioned this CSS photo editor he bookmarked a few months back. It’s a test site for new CSS features in iOS6 and other modern browsers for CSS filters and input[type=“file”] that lets you edit photos using CSS filters. Check out the site, the source, the blog post explaining the project, and the episode at around 17:20 to hear us discuss this.
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This is a great library by Jerry Jones for customizing page controls. Today he added support for image masks and syncing the page state to a UIScrollView. Really great stuff. Read more about it on his blog and of course grab the code on GitHub.
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