A Grand Unification Theory of iOS Styling
If you've been on a team developing iOS apps before, you've probably been involved in a discussion or outright debate about how to handle styling, or the visual appearance of the app. Here, roughly, are the three sides of that debate:
1. We should style everything directly in storyboards / Interface Builder
It's . . .
WWDC 2016 Wishlist #5 : Restore Game Controller Requirements on Apple TV
When Apple released their new Apple TV and tvOS last year, the initial documentation said that apps for for the new platform could require a game controller to play. Such apps would only appear in the store and be downloadable for users who had connected a game controller. This seemed like a great implementation since it would protect users . . .
WWDC 2016 Wishlist #4: Universal Messaging Extension and APIs
Let me start off by saying this: it's 2016, we live in a time of software and service consolidations and unprecedented contextual awareness, and yet if I want to keep up with a friend or family member, I'm still having to do it in a dozen places: text messages, Slack, Twitter, e-mail (multiple accounts), Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, . . .
WWDC 2016 Wishlist #3 : More Useful Size Classes
The Current State of Size Classes
Apple introduced size classes in iOS 8, which provide a broad description of horizontal and vertical screen space. These broad descriptions currently only include "Regular" or "Compact" options. The great thing about size classes is that they allow developers to create different . . .
WWDC 2016 Wishlist #2 : tvOS "Channel" Extensions
During my speculation last year about the new Apple TV that was soon to be announced and released, I was most excited about imagining a possible new paradigm for discovering and interacting with apps on the platform. At the time, I called it "apps as channels", and here is how it would work:
Unlike the typical iOS / . . .
WWDC 2016 Wishlist #1: Swift Playgrounds on iPad
With Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference just around the corner, now is feeling a little bit like Christmas Eve for iOS / OSX developers and even the more hardcore non-developer users. I posted a wishlist before WWDC last year and was really happy to have 5 out of my 13 wishes come true (although a couple of them were announced . . .
Swift's "Final" Countdown
And the inevitable deprecation of inheritance-based polymorphism
There’s an interesting discussion happening currently regarding a proposal on the swift-evolution mailing list to make Class types final by default in Swift. The initial proposal references the occasional need for a reference type that is not intended to be subclassed as the primary motivation.
There are some developers who are . . .