Issue 140 – June 26th 2018

A lot has been said about free trials in the App Store in recent months, partly as a result of the Developer Union publicly declaring free trials as one of their initial objectives, partly as a result of Apple’s recent changes to their IAP guidelines and partly as a result of articles like this one from @danielpunkass highlighting that Apple’s changes do not in fact consitute free trials as most of us would know it. This article from @drewmccormack takes a different approach though by trying to understand the topic of free trials from Apple’s perspective.

With the recent, relatively silent, introduction of Creative Sets to Apple’s Search Ads, @sylvainww looks at what they are, how to use them and some of the opportunities they provide. On top of this, the article also provides a a useful introduction to Apple’s Search Ads in general if you’ve never used them before.

I somehow missed this article when it first came out. With tab bars increasingly becoming the go-to approach for many UI designs, Fabian Sebastian takes a detailed look at the history of tab bars and some of the usability issues they introduce. He then turns his attention to toward how to fix some of these issues. It’s a good read.

Given the number of links I saw to it this week you may already have seen this article from @gpeal8 on why he and the team at @airbnbeng are, after two years, moving away from React Native to focus on native development. It’s worth taking the time to read as it gives a pretty balanced view of React Native as a technology, just how difficult it is to run large cross-platform development teams and also highlights some of the lessons Gabriel and the team have learnt over the past couple of years.

@onmyway133 explores Apple’s Vision framework and the OCR library Tesseract, and shows them how to perform automatic number recognition of what must be the biggest, most vast number, gigantic that you’ve ever imagined. Read the article, you’ll see what I mean. :wink:

One of the most fundamental components in iOS development is the UITableView . Although this ever-popular control is, on the face of it, relatively simple, handling it’s different states (such as when it is empty or when loading) can add additional complexity. In this tutorial, @rushkeegan shows you how to tame some of this complexity through the use of a state-enum – using it to track the table view’s different states and in turn helping to make your table view code easier to understand and maintain.

Nice tip from @thomvis on how to ensure that your XCTest assertions report the correct line number when using helper methods in your tests. Spoiler: Default parameter values are :+1:.

As you probably know, Swift is a multi-paragim language, bluring the lines between a number of different programming paradigms. One of these paradigms is functional programming and in this article, @trozware cuts through the mass of theory and technical verbage to provide a gentle introduction to the topic.

@eataduckimust , @parrots and @jellybeansoup discuss some of the challenges of being an indie developer and talk about how they make financial decisions about what to do with the money their businesses make. It’s really interesting to hear the different approaches that each of them takes and also how different those approaches are. I guess as with most things in life, there’s no one right answer.

Although we have had some nice updates on the software side of things in recent years, Apple’s hardware has undoubtedly been languishing. With the exception of the iMac Pro (which techically was a new product), none of Apple’s Mac line have received updates within the last year, and in some cases the hardware that they do have has been plagued by issues . Quentin Carnicelli has been lamenting this sorry state of affairs. I can’t help but agree with although I do have my fingers crossed for some announcements in the autumn.