Tag: development

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WWDC21

WWDC is always a cool, exciting, busy, scary week for anyone developing apps for the Apple eco-system. Will your app get Sherlocked1? Will there be new APIs that completely change how your apps work? Are there exciting new opportunities? Long story short, if you Apple developer friends look stressed over the summer, the things announced at WWDC are likely the reason.

This year’s WWDC was great. The move from in-person to remote has been fairly seemless from an outsiders perspective, though I’m sure it didn’t feel that way to the organisers. My favourite feature is that the videos can be just the right length rather than having to be stretched to fill fourty minutes.

The keynotes were not the highlight. Unusually for Apple, there wasn’t much of a story connecting the announcements, just a list of features. Which is not to say that the features were bad. The improvements to FaceTime alone look like they’re worth the price of entry. Focus should be good — I use “Do Not Disturb” a lot — and the streamlining of notifications feels overdue.

From a developer perspective, I have not seen anything that dramatically change Wandle Software’s plans. I’ll start building our apps in the new developer kit sooner rather than later but at this time I don’t see any glitzy new features enabled by the update2.

If this all sounds negative or that I’m underwhelmed, that is not the case. iOS 15 appears to be a large number of very nice, relatively small improvements. There’s no one, big thing to get super excited about but, in the grand scheme, these quality-of-life updates often have a greater effect. From what I’ve seen, it’s quite stable, especially for a first beta, which bodes well for September or October when it will get a wider release.

  1. Will Apple incorporate all your functionality in the operating system itself. ↩︎
  2. Frustratingly, there are some good tools that I’d like to use but that will have to wait until I can stop supporting iOS 14. ↩︎
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trivia

App Store Connect and Tide bank

The audience for this post is pretty niche, but I thought it worth posting nevertheless. If you’re a UK-based developer with an App Store Connect account and want Apple to pay your proceeds into a Tide bank account, you are in the right demographic.

In short, this was not possible until recently. Apple pay from abroad somewhere so you need an IBAN number, and Tide didn’t support international payments, even in Sterling.

That changed recently. But if you enter your details into Apple’s website it says “The local clearing code you selected does not match the corresponding part of your IBAN.”

If you’re familiar with IBAN numbers maybe the solution is obvious but it wasn’t to me. With the help of David from App Store connect and some luck (if it didn’t work I may have lost some money!) I found the answer:

Don’t enter your bank account number and sort code. Instead, dissect your IBAN number. It’ll be in the form GB67SAPYXXXXXXYYYYYYYY. Put the digits XXXXXX in the sort code field and YYYYYYYY in account number field. Put the IBAN number in the IBAN field.

A couple of days later I got an error message: “An error occurred whilst creating the Request,” suggesting that I shouldn’t have emoji characters or large attachments (I didn’t). I emailed Apple and got a not entirely convincing response.

Still, it appears to have worked.

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trivia

WWDC 2015

As always, WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference, is a bit of a firehose even when you’re sitting at home just reading the blogs and watching the occasional session video. I’m not sure how people in San Francisco actually keep up!

What I’m trying to say is that this post is far from complete. I’m sure that I’ve missed something important. But here is my top four things that I’ve taken away so far.

Bitcode

I list this one first because this is the one I’m most concerned about. The gist is that instead of compiling apps down to ARM and ARM64 code and sending that to Apple for review and release, we send a “partially compiled” app to Apple. When a user downloads it, Apple’s servers finish the job, compiling this intermediate code down to the specific hardware that they have.

Clearly this is Apple’s way of saying that new hardware is on the way — also see App Thinning — and they don’t want us to have to recompile our apps before they’ll work on it.

Why is that bad? Well, I have no idea what code will be executing on my users machines. What optimiser settings are Apple using? What compiler are they using? Are there any bugs in it?

Or put another way, Apple put an invisible step between the developer and the user. If it works, users get an optimised app. If it doesn’t, the developer gets a bunch of one star reviews for something that they had no ability to test. It doesn’t seem to me that the upside outweighs the risks.

Let’s hope they do it well and cautiously. Or that the new hardware is worth the hassle!

iPad multitasking

This one is going to sell a lot of iPad Air 2’s to developers in the next couple of months. I love this both as a developer and as a user.

As a user, being able to run two apps side by side suddenly makes the iPad far more useful. Can I say, finally?

And as a developer, it’s not even terribly hard to implement as long as the app is relatively new. With the caveat that more testing is needed, I got Yummy up and running in the Simulator without changing any code.

SLSafariViewController

It’s basically a “Safari view controller” that developers can use to show web content in their apps.

I thought that this would be ideal for Yummy. The value of the browser in Yummy is diminished by its lack of autofill (of password, addresses, credit card details, etc.) and log in details. SLSafariViewController, which suffers from none of those disadvantages, sounds like the solution.

However, in the first beta at least it’s limited in two important ways that means it won’t work in this scenario. Firstly, it’s modal. Secondly you can’t edit the URL. I’ve raised bug reports about both. We’ll see.

Still, I can see uses for it in its current form.

Spotlight searching inside apps

This is another good one, both for users and developers. Using Spotlight search — which has had lots of other nice improvements too — it will be possible to find things inside apps.

For example I was able to use Spotlight to find bookmarks that had been indexed by Yummy. This is more work that the multitasking but is not super hard.

In summary…

Yeah, I didn’t mention Swift or the Apple Watch. I think both have a great future but I don’t have any immediate applications for either right now. (For what it’s worth, my first app with Swift in it will probably ship before the end of the year.)

Like the multitasking, the Spotlight searches are going to create more reasons for more users to keep using compatible apps. But, more than that, it’s going to make apps considerably more useful without having to invest vast amounts of time to get the benefits.

This contrasts greatly with the last two releases of iOS. With 7, a huge amount of work was required just so that apps didn’t look out of place in the New World. For many apps, that work resulted in no new features or stability improvements. Version 8 required none of that, but it was a huge release for developers. Extensions were brilliant, but required a lot of work, especially since the development tools were flaky.

iOS 9 appears to be a stability release for Apple and the new features seem to give a lot of “bangs per buck” for developers. That’s my kind of release.

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trivia

What you forgot from your Computer Science Degree

On Wednesday evening I did a quick presentation at the London iOS Developer Group meeting at the Regent Street Apple Store in London.

What you forgot from your Computer Science Degree from Stephen Darlington

It’s about how I implemented a small feature in both Yummy and www.cut.

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LiDG Presentation

Last night I did a short talk at the London iOS Developer Group meeting at the Regent Street Apple Store. It was based on some of my experience working on Wandle’s apps (and other non-iPhone-related work I’ve done previously) and so, while it’s a little technical, I thought you might be interested to see a little about it.

You can get a copy of my slides here and I’ve put a short write up about it on my personal blog.