Issue 141 – July 3rd 2018

Monument Valley was break-out success of 2014 receiving an Apple Design award and rave reviews from around the community. Last year, the team at @ustwogames followed up with a sequel – Monument Valley II – but how has this gamed faired in an increasingly competitive app store? It’s pretty interesting to see how the numbers stack up especially how much money they have had to invest in marketing, despite the relative success of it’s predecessor.

With users storing ever-increasing amounts of data within their mobile apps adding search capabilities to your app is becoming an increasingly important feature (if it wasn’t already). In this article, @shashanksahayy discusses how to pick between the two most popular approaches for this – a search bar on your apps navigation bar / landing screen or a search tab within a UITabBarController .

Deciding on how to handle mutability in your app is an important part of app design. What parts of the code base should be able to mutate your apps data? How will those changes be propogated within your app? @johnsundell highlights a few different techniques to help you answer these questions.

When tackling a large refactoring, it’s usually a good approach to tackle the refactoring in smaller, more managable steps where possible. Commonly this means adding temporary code that keeps everything compiling but the problem is that it’s relatively easy to to forget to go back and remove this code once everything is compiling again. With this in mind @chriseidhof and @floriankugler have come up with a nice tip that leverages Swift’s availability APIs to create some useful reminders.

As Mac and iOS developers we have a wide range of options at our disposal for implementing and controlling concurrency within our apps and when used carefully they can provide some significant benefits. The reality though is that even with the help of some great concurrency frameworks from Apple, concurrency is still a tricky problem. In this article, @olbrich_jan looks at some of the things that might go wrong if you’re not careful.

Popularised by the likes of Twitter and Facebook, this tutorial from @flexaddicted shows you how to build on Apple’s existing UICollectionView infrastructure to implement infinite scrolling within your app.

Introduced in iOS 10, Apple’s new unified logging system helps free your console by providing a single, efficient, high-performant API for capturing log messages within your system. Added to this it also provides integration with activity tracking allowing log messages to be automatically correlated – a great boost for debugging and diagnosis. @dagostin has been digging into some of the details.

If you haven’t seen it already, this week @mbrandonw and @stephencelis from @pointfreeco have released a new open-source library NonEmpty – a Swift library for modelling non-empty collection types. It’s actually pretty useful as edge cases are checked automatically by the compiler removing the need for manual checks throughout your code.

On the back of his latest book Swift Numbers , @mattt has this week released two new libraries, Money – a Swift library for representing monetary amounts in a type-safe manner and CurrencyConverter – an associated utility library for performing conversions between different currencies. Both look super useful especially if you’re working with money and currencies within your app.

An interesting article has surfaced this week from @panzer at @TechCrunch around Apple Maps. It turns out he’s had some behind-the-sceens access to Apple’s mapping team and in this article he discusses the history of maps on Apple platforms, the importance of maps to the Apple ecosystem as a whole as well as Apple’s ongoing drive to own the entire mapping stack. It’s an intersting read and makes you wonder whether we’ll see some MapKit improvements on the horizon.