Issue 150 – September 11th 2018

Business

A Farewell to StreamToMe

A deeply honest write-up from @cocoawithlove on the history, lessons, and his reasoning for finally retiring, his app StreamToMe. Props to Matt for sharing this one. cocoawithlove.com

Surviving the App Store

Indie game developer and creator of the app store hit ‘A Dark Room’ @amirrajan with the manuscript of his book – Surviving the App Store. Published under creative commons, it has a bunch of great tips and interviews with other indie game developers discussing what it takes to make it as an indie game developer. github.com

The Ultimate Guide to Succeeding in the Chinese App Market

China represents a huge (and potentially lucrative) market for any app developer looking to expand their user base but becoming successful in this market requires effort and a strong understanding of the cultural differences between China and western markets. @appinchina highlight some of the key factors to consider. medium.com

Design

The Magic of Paper Prototyping

Despite the progression in digital design tools, paper and a pencil can often be the most useful design tools you have at your disposal. In this article, @101babich look at some of the strengths and weaknesses of this ‘back-to-basics’ approach along with some practical tips and recommendations. uxplanet.org

Lessons Learned From the RWDevCon 2018 Design Lab

Following on from the recent RwDevCon 2018, @l_ukefreeman has a great write up of some of the most common design issues the team at RayWenderlich saw during the two-day Design Lab they held during the conference. It’s worth reading as there are some great lessons to be learnt here. raywenderlich.com

Swift

Early Returning Functions in Swift

Regardless of language, how and when a function can return is often the source of much discussion around the interwebs with some advocating a return fast, return often approach and others pushing for single returns statements. As @johnsundell illustrates in this article, through the use of the the guard statement, the Swift language tends to promote the former approach which can have some serious benefits for code clarity. swiftbysundell.com

Delegates vs Closure Callbacks

In addition to the traditional delegate pattern used extensively in Objective-C, closures in Swift have added an alternative approach – closure callbacks – which have been slowly growing in popularity as Swift has matured. @SteveBarnegren has been looking at the differnences between these two patterns and trying to identify some specific recommendations of when each approach should be used. itnext.io

Code

Building a Gesture-Based Interface iOS App with Core ML and ARKit

Ok, we’re not quite at minority report yet and it’s not that practical at the moment but I enjoyed this article from @brunomuniz_af which, through the use of ARKit and Core ML, explores the boundaries of human-computer interaction by creating a gesture-based interface for browsing the web. fritz.ai

Using Your Custom Mapbox Map and Adding Navigation Using Swift

MapBox is increasingly a major player when it comes to mobile mapping solutions and in this article, @rockarts explores some it’s iOS SDK using it to create an iOS app with custom map and navigation features. dev.to

Network Layer in Swift 4.0

When it comes to networking in your iOS apps there are generally two choices – use an external library like Alamofire or Moya or write the networking layer yourself. Although turning to an external library may be the easiest and maybe quickest approach, it’s not actually that hard to write a protocol-oriented, type-safe networking layer of your own and one that you fully understand and are in control of. @marcinjackowski shows you how. medium.com

Hacking Hit Tests

Ok, so unless you’ve been doing some hard-core UIKit wizardry, it’s unlikely that you’ll have had much to do with UIKit’s touch handling subsystem. Buckle up though as @khanlou is about to take you on a journey through Apple’s documentation, hits, points, recursion and view hierarchies. khanlou.com

Tools

What’s Inside the Derived Data Folder?

If you’ve spend any time programming with Xcode, you’ll have no doubt come across the ‘delete the derived data folder’ trick for kicking Xcode back into shape when it starts to become unruly. But in all those times you have blindly deleted the folder and restarted Xcode, have you ever thought about what the derived data folder actually contains? Wonder no more – @VojtaStavik has all the details. vojtastavik.com

Other

How to Teach Yourself Hard Things

As developers, we’re always faced with learning new frameworks, languages and techniques but let’s be honest, they’re not always the simplest of topics to understand. Rather than letting this get you down, @b0rk has some great advice on how to tackle learning these difficult topics. jvns.ca

The iPhone’s Original UI Designer on Apple’s Greatest Flaws

Finally, to close out this weeks issue, an interesting article from @kschwabable in which she interviews ex-Apple designer Imran Chaudhri – one of the original six-person team who designed the iPhone – about Apple, interface design and the future of smartphones. fastcompany.com