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Swift Four -point- One And All

Looks like a particularly Good Friday today: It’s iOS 11.3 Day, which means Xcode 9.3 Day, which means we have a new Swift to learn:

Swift 4.1 Released!

Swift 4.1 is now officially released! It contains updates to the core language, including more support for generics, new build options, as well as minor enhancements to Swift Package Manager and Foundation. There was also significant progress made in stabilizing the ABI.

Doug Gregor and Ben Cohen recently discussed many of these features on a two-part episode of the Swift Unwrapped podcast. Check out the podcasts here: Part 1 and Part 2…

The most code-affecting (by elimination, in the case of Equatable & Hashable!) bits are the progress on the generics front:

Swift 4.1 adds more generics features to the language, furthering the goals set out in the Swift Generics Manifesto. The following generics-related proposals have been implemented in this release:

SE-0143 Conditional Conformance
SE-0157 Support recursive constraints on associated types
SE-0185 Synthesizing Equatable and Hashable conformance
SE-0187 Introduce Sequence.compactMap(_:)
SE-0188 Make Standard Library Index Types Hashable
SE-0191 Eliminate IndexDistance from Collection

For more information about progress made with conditional conformance in Swift 4.1, check out this blog post…

Do indeed check out that blog post,

Conditional Conformance in the Standard Library

The Swift 4.1 compiler brings the next phase of improvements from the roadmap for generics: conditional conformances.

This post will look at how this much-anticipated feature has been adopted in Swift’s standard library, and how it affects you and your code…

TL;DR: Things like Optionals and Arrays and Dictionaries will now be Equatable if their contents are, the way things should work!

More than TL;DR: Swift 4.1 conditional conformance is 💖AMAZING💖  and Conditional Conformance

Also, if you’d like more mapping smarts in JSONDecoder, there’s help with that:

JSONEncoder: Key strategies

The strategy enum allows developers to pick from common actions of converting to and from `snake_case` to the Swift-standard `camelCase`. The implementation is intentionally simple, because we want to make the rules predictable…

More discussion in Swift 4.1 improves Codable with keyDecodingStrategy

And the common nil-stripping application of flatMap is deprecated: Replacing flatMap With compactMap

If you‘re trying to hit a binary size target, this’ll help: Code Size Optimization Mode in Swift 4.1

That’s about it for things we’ve noticed of interest, but there’s another comprehensive roundup over at Chez Wenderlich in What’s New in Swift 4.1? — anything we missed here is no doubt in there!

Alex | March 30, 2018
Reviews Tools
Review: Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane

 We’ve been idly following fastlane since it was just deliver, and it has had a lively lifespan indeed from obscurity to Twitter to Google and all; so it’s reasonably sure it’s approaching industry standard status at this point, which would make a canonical introduction to it handy indeed. And, why, look what we have to review today, a shiny new copy of

Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane

Fastlane Book Cover

 

Competitive mobile apps depend strongly on the development team’s ability to deliver successful releases, consistently and often. Although continuous integration took a more mainstream priority among the development industry, companies are starting to realize the importance of continuity beyond integration and testing…

What You Will Learn

  • Harness the fastlane tools for the Continuous Deployment strategy
  • Integrate Continuous Deployment with existing Continuous Integration.
  • Automate upload of screenshots across all device screen-sizes
  • Manage push notifications, provisioning profiles, and code-signing certificates
  • Orchestrate automated build and deployments of new versions of your app
  • Regulate your TestFlight users and on-board new testers

It’s actually not 100% accurate, that title; a more accurate one would be “The Complete Beginner’s Guide To How To Ship An iOS App With fastlane Making It Suck Less.” That wasn’t quite as buzzword-compliant, we suppose.

If you do happen to be an iOS-focused complete beginner at dealing with iTunes Connect and all, and you intend to follow the common path of Crashlytics and/or TestFlight for beta distribution … then yes, we believe we can recommend this unqualifiedly as the most coherent introduction out there, go buy it and you can stop reading now!

If you’ve already got this distribution thing sussed, and you’re just curious about whether this fastlane thing that all the cool kids are into these days is worth adopting … hmmm, we’ll give it a three out of five. It’s worthy at explaining what it does explain, but to make it five-star for the more accomplished developer, we’d need two star-worthy things:

1. Documentation on the Android setup and shipping process as thorough as there is for iOS. There’s about six pages worth here, which is pretty thin compared to the iOS coverage. 

If you couldn’t care less about shipping for Android, of course, then this is not a valid criticism.

2. More thorough examples of how to integrate with CI and testing services other than the selected ones, to actually deserve the Continuous Delivery label. As a specific omission we were looking for, the book promises

The next step in this beta lane is to distribute our app via two popular testing platforms: TestFlight and HockeyApp.

… and then goes on to not deliver on this promise for HockeyApp. Since that was, in fact, the main thing we were looking for in this book, how to set it up with a HockeyApp-centric workflow, we were disappointed. So we figure that we’ll take another point off for not being an encyclopedic reference. Yes, we’re brutal. Again, if you are a complete beginner and/or you do use the standard tools that the book does cover, this is not a valid criticism either.

Should you be teetering, here is the publisher’s page and you can check out the TOC and all; plus the code repo for the examples — adding fastlane to Firefox — is here on Github.

But definitely, if you know anyone who’s just getting into iOS development, we’d rate this the best introduction there is out there without question!

On the other hand, as long as we’re talking about fastlane and all, there is the odd pocket of resistance to it you might read for balance:

Five Options for iOS Continuous Delivery Without Fastlane

If you’re looking to escape Fastlane’s frequent build-breaking changes, these five options for iOS continuous delivery are worth examining…

… but that’s definitely a minority opinion, most people find it adds at least some value.

As an example, up there where I docked it a point for not including less popular CI/deployment options? Here is an example of one such:

How to set up GitLab Continuous Integration for iOS projects without a hassle

Why GitLab-CI?

We had GitLab and we couldn’t find any reason for using something else. So, we decided to use it, why not 😎? As for me, the GitLab-CI/CD is more developer-oriented than Jenkins. At least because it is aimed at the pipelines, tags, and branches, unlike Jenkins with jobs. And we have to use those things to get the necessary job instead of configuration without code. GitLab-CI/CD seems like a tool for running scripts on a remote machine; no more, but enough.

Some time later, we realized what it doesn’t matter what to use if we use Fastlane. Because it was able to do all what we needed. As the result, we got freedom from other tools. So I can strongly recommend using Fastlane instead of manual scripts or other approaches…

And, of course, we do find several mentions of “Hockey” over at 

fastlane/examples: “A collection of example fastlane setups”

so it’s not as if their omission is a crippling lack in any way. We just figure a book like this should aim for canonical completeness!

Alex | March 23, 2018
Programming
Delegate Strength Tip: No More Weakness

Now here’s a simple tip worthy of some signal boosting: If you had to pick the most annoying thing about modern Cocoa programming, that continues to regularly trip up even the best of the experts, what would you pick?

Yep, the weak-strong dance, that was our pick too. From the original @weakify and @strongify horrors through the currently conventional [weak-self]-guard-return boilerplate in Swift, it’s just distracting noise and all to easy to overlook with no help from the compiler in catching your retain cycles isn’t it?

Well, here is by far the most elegant solution to that problem we’ve ever seen!

Do you often forget [weak self]? Here’s a solution

You see, from an API design point of view, this new approach actually made things worse. Previously, the designer of an ImageDownloader API was responsible for not introducing any memory leaks to our app. Now, it’s an exclusive obligation of the API user.

And [weak self] is something that is incredibly easy to overlook. I’m more than sure that there is a lot of code out there (even in production) that suffers from this simple, but so ubiquitous problem … We can’t rely even on ourselves to write [weak self] in every part of our app (where needed), and we certainly cannot expect all our potential API users to do the same. As API designers, we need to care about safety at the point of use.

Exactly so!

Let’s look at the core of the problem: 99% of the time, when assigning a delegation callback, there should be a [weak self] capture list, but nothing is actually preventing ourselves from omitting it. No errors, no warnings, nothing. What if instead we could force the correct behavior?

Yes, that is, in fact, something we do want to force. And Messr. Dreyman has a remarkably concise and elegant solution to adopt:

public struct Delegated<Input, Output> {

    private(set) var callback: ((Input) -> Output?)?

    public mutating func delegate<Target: AnyObject>(to target: Target,
						     with callback: @escaping (Target, Input) -> Output) {
	self.callback = { [weak target] input in
	  guard let target = target else { return nil }
	  return callback(target, input)
	}
    }
}

and then you use like

self.downloader = ImageDownloader()
downloader.didDownload.delegate(to: self) { (self, image) in
   self.currentImage = image
}

That’s a massive leap in safety for very little work, we’re going to adopt it immediately.

With handy accessors and conveniences to go along the library’s still under 50 lines of code — copy the code (or load it with your package manager of choice) from Delegated on github!

Alex | March 14, 2018
Programming
Universal Links: The Web-App Connection

Hmmm, looks like we’ve never got around to noticing Universal Links for Developers in this space before; the advantages of those, from Support Universal Links, are

  • Unique. Unlike custom URL schemes, universal links can’t be claimed by other apps, because they use standard HTTP or HTTPS links to your website.
  • Secure. When users install your app, iOS checks a file that you’ve uploaded to your web server to make sure that your website allows your app to open URLs on its behalf. Only you can create and upload this file, so the association of your website with your app is secure.
  • Flexible. Universal links work even when your app is not installed. When your app isn’t installed, tapping a link to your website opens the content in Safari, as users expect.
  • Simple. One URL works for both your website and your app.
  • Private. Other apps can communicate with your app without needing to know whether your app is installed.

Big step up from the custom URL stuff we last mentioned way back in URL Scheme Tidbits, isn’t that? Here’s a well worth reading article to bring us up to speed on some practical applications:

Techniques to Connect Websites to iOS Apps

First, what’s the end game here? To simply leverage some hosted .json files on your server and put meta tags in your markup to allow users to jump straight into your app or display information about it more effectively. That’s it.

This stuff is typically key for SaaS business’ or solopreneurs because in the world we live in, where there is a SaaS website a (hopefully) native app will follow. We want to help them dance together.

It helps that iOS 11 built features specifically for this. Open up your camera, point it at a QR code. Boom — iOS shows us the actionable details. Share a link in messages. Get a rich text preview. The list goes on…

QR code support? Yep, that comes for free with your apple-app-site-association file:

If you host such a file, the end result is that your app will immediately show to open via a notification when the user points at the QR code. The only metadata your QR code needs is the URL for your website.

No external QR code download, no more taps — nothing. It just happens.

If the user doesn’t have your app, Safari will kick in instead, taking them to your website…

… Safari handles all of this as well. If you hosted the QR code as an image, and an iOS user 3D touches on it — this exact same flows happens.

Yeah? Cool!

And if you haven’t looked into Shared Web Credentials for iOS 11 yet, that’s easy too, just associate your domains and tell the app where the credentials go:

This nifty trick is absolutely essential for you if your app has a log in mechanism or any user portal system online. By employing password autofill, users can tap on the lock icon in the quicktype bar that appears over the keyboard, authenticate and then have their information automatically filled out.

It’s beautiful, and I use it daily.

To allow for this to happen, there is minor housekeeping that you need to do for the text fields or text views representing your log in. Simply assign the correct values added in iOS 11 to their textContentType property…

… Once you throw that up on your site — the entire web credentials and password autofill pipeline is all set. I can’t tell you how much times this saves from a user perspective. It goes up by an order of magnitude if one uses Safari’s password suggestions as well.

Lastly, there’s tips on how to enrich your Messages sharing:

Sharing links within Messages is a ubiquitous practice among iOS users. Nothing is more rewarding than tapping on the link cards, with their inviting .png hero images sitting there beckoning us to load up a website within Safari.

Except when that doesn’t happen, and it’s just plain text 😬.

This is so easy to avoid, though, as you easily can control the title, icon, image and even video that displays. Using the open graph protocol, you can supply all of this stuff inside your site’s <head> tag…

The article finishes off by recapping Smart Banners in case you haven’t gotten around to those since iOS 6 either. That makes it a pretty much definitive resource for your app and website coordination — thoroughly recommend you go read and bookmark!

Alex | March 5, 2018
Programming
Promises, Promises, Knowing I’d Believe

And in Spot the 80s Lyric today, that post title is Naked Eyes providing the soundtrack for today’s post; we’re going to take a look at an interesting new library from Google named simply

promises

 

In general, a promise represents the eventual result of an asynchronous task, respectively the error reason when the task fails. Similar concepts are also called futures (see also wiki article: Futures and promises)…

Promises is a modern framework that implements the aforementioned synchronization construct in Swift and Objective-C.

Features

  • Simple: The framework has intuitive APIs that are well documented making it painless to integrate into new or existing code.
  • Interoperable: Supports both Objective-C and Swift. Promises that are created in Objective-C can be used in Swift and vice versa.
  • Lightweight: Has minimum overhead that achieves similar performance to GCD and completion handlers.
  • Flexible: Observer blocks can be dispatched on any thread or custom queue.
  • Safe: All promises and observer blocks are captured by GCD which helps avoid potential retain cycles.
  • Tested: The framework has 100% test coverage.

Benchmark
One of the biggest concerns for all frameworks is the overhead they add on top of the standard library (GCD in this case).

The data below was collected by running performance tests for Objective-C and Swift on an iPhone 6s iOS 11.2.1 for the popular frameworks: PromiseKit, BrightFutures, Hydra, RxSwift and plain GCD for comparison…

There’s a whole bunch of metrics collected there, this is the one we found most interesting:

Google Promises Benchmarks

So if you do have a need to mix Objective-C and Swift async code, promises looks like a pretty good option to consider!

However, these benchmarking comparisons aren’t going to mean very much in typical usage patterns, so you should probably go with whatever syntax feels most collegial, really.

Also, those benchmarks are probably not up to date with PromiseKit, which just updated:

PromiseKit 6 Released

With PromiseKit our then did multiple things, and we relied on Swift to infer the correct then from context. However with multiple line thens it would fail to do this, and instead of telling you that the situation was ambiguous it would invent some other error. Often the dreaded cannot convert T to AnyPromise. We have a troubleshooting guide to combat this but I believe in tools that just work, and when you spend 4 years waiting for Swift to fix the issue and Swift doesn’t fix the issue, what do you do? We chose to find a solution at the higher level.

So we split then into then, done and map.

  • then is fed the previous promise value and requires you return a promise.
  • done is fed the previous promise value and returns a Void promise (which is 80% of chain usage)
  • map is fed the previous promise value and requires you return a non-promise, ie. a value.

At first I was nervous about this. But with some use on real projects I quickly realized that done alone was making PromiseKit use much more pleasant. Because Swift has no inference to do about the return for done you can write many line closures without any pain. then and map still require you to specify the return types for closures if they are multiple line, but often they are single line because you are chaining promises encapsulated in other functions.

The result is a happier compiler, a happier you and also, pleasantly (and somewhat surprisingly), clearer intent for your chains.

There’s another recent release in this space that’s mostly under the radar so far but looks like it merits a close look as well:

Tomorrowland

It is loosely based on both PromiseKit and Hydra, with a few key distinctions:

  • It uses atomics internally instead of creating a separate DispatchQueue for each promise. This means it’s faster and uses fewer resources.
  • It provides full support for cancellable promises. PromiseKit supports detection of “cancelled” errors but has no way to request cancellation of a promise. Hydra supports cancelling a promise, but it can’t actually stop any work being done by the promise unless the promise body itself polls for the cancellation status (so e.g. a promise wrapping a network task can’t reasonably cancel the network task). Tomorrowland improves on this by allowing the promise body to observe the cancelled state, and allows linking cancellation of a child promise to its parent.
  • Its Obj-C support makes use of generics for improved type safety and better documentation.
  • Like Hydra but unlike PromiseKit, it provides a way to suppress a registered callback (e.g. because you don’t care about the result anymore and don’t want stale data affecting your UI). This is distinct from promise cancellation.
  • Tomorrowland promises are fully generic over the error type, whereas both PromiseKit and Hydra only support using Error as the error type. This may result in more typing to construct a promise but it allows for much more powerful error handling. Tomorrowland also has some affordances for working with promises that use Error as the error type.
  • Tomorrowland is fully thread-safe. I have no reason to believe PromiseKit isn’t, but (at the time of this writing) there are parts of Hydra that are incorrectly implemented in a non-thread-safe manner.

 

and here’s another:

Getting Started with Deferred

At Big Nerd Ranch, we have created a library called Deferred, which makes it easier for developers to work with data that is not yet available but will be at some point in the future. For example, when you’re downloading data from the network or parsing data, the data is not yet available because some work needs to be completed first. You might know this concept as Futures or Promises, but if not, don’t worry—this post will help you gain a better understanding…

…It was originally inspired by OCaml’s Deferred library.

And there’s a couple more mentioned in this excellent article on the subject,

Under the hood of Futures & Promises in Swift

So there’s a veritable plethora of abstractions to choose from.

Long as we’re on the topic of asynchronicity and all, here’s a good read on parallelization:

Parallel programming with Swift: Basics and Parallel programming with Swift: Operations

and a couple task libraries to take a look at:

Queuer

Queuer is a queue manager, built on top of OperationQueue and Dispatch (aka GCD).
It allows you to create any synchronous and asynchronous task easily, with just a few lines.

Here is the list of all the features:

  • Works on all Swift compatible platforms (even Linux *)
  • Easy to use
  • Well documented (100% documented)
  • Well tested (currently 99% code coverage)
  • Create an operation block
  • Create a single operation
  • Create chained operations
  • Manage a centralized queue
  • Create unlimited queue
  • Declare how many concurrent operation a queue can handle
  • Create a network request operation *
  • Create a network download operation *
  • Create a network upload operation *
  • Ability to restore uncompleted network operations *

ProcedureKit

A Swift framework inspired by WWDC 2015 Advanced NSOperations session. Previously known as Operations, developed by @danthorpe with a lot of help from our fantastic community…

And finally, here’s some lower level tidbits that are worth noting if you have challenges where you need to go right to the metal:

Friday Q&A 2017-10-27: Locks, Thread Safety, and Swift: 2017 Edition

Back in the dark ages of Swift 1, I wrote an article about locks and thread safety in Swift. The march of time has made it fairly obsolete, and reader Seth Willits suggested I update it for the modern age, so here it is!

Initializing on the main thread using dispatch_once without race conditions

We recently refactored the Khan Academy iOS app to use Core Data instead of the haphazard system of JSON files which we were previously using. In this post I’ll explain how to run initialization code that has to happen on the main thread without worrying about race conditions…

Leaky abstractions in Swift with DispatchQueue

At Q42 we have some apps with very occasional weird multi-threading issues. After a bunch of debugging Mathijs Kadijk and I figured out it had something to do with DispatchSpecificKey…

A Simple Approach to Thread-Safe Networking in iOS Apps

With our newfound understanding of URLSession‘s threading model, let’s sketch out how we might extend it to easily support running two requests in parallel. (The source code for this section is available on GitHub, ready for you to drop into a Playground.)…

UPDATES:

Understanding DispatchQueues

Alex | February 26, 2018
Programming
Summer of Code 2018

Well, here’s some news that’s interesting and also apropos to our Letter To A Young Developer from last time: 

  1. Are you a student developer? (If you’re not, but you know any, keep reading)
  2. Are you interested in an open source internship? (Correct answer is: YES)
  3. Are you interested in SWIFT? (If you’re not, ok wrong blog you may go now)

OK then, here’s an opportunity for you to jump on:

Google Summer of Code 2018

2018SummerOfCode

13,000+ STUDENTS, 108 COUNTRIES
13 YEARS, 608 OPEN SOURCE ORGANIZATIONS

33,000,000+ LINES OF CODE

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project during their break from school…

Which is an interesting opportunity every year yes, but this year is particularly interesting if you have designs on the Apple ecosystem:

Swift to participate in GSoC 2018!

I am thrilled to announced that Swift has been selected as a participating open source project in Google Summer of Code 2018!

…  Student applications start on March 12, 2018

The official application to GSoC starts on March 12. Before then, we encourage all prospective participates to socialize their ideas on the respective Development forum categories. Please tag all posts with the GSoC 2018 tag so that they are easily discoverable by others (e.g., students and mentors) interested in GSoC.

There are several open project ideas available on Swift.org — but potential projects do not need to be restricted to these ideas. Regardless if you are looking into working on a suggested project or one of your own creation, you are strongly encouraged to engage on the forums before applications are accepted to help shape your idea and ensure a good alignment with a mentor.

… Key Dates
March 12 (16:00 UTC) – Applications open
March 27 (16:00 UTC) – Deadline to file your application
April 23 (16:00 UTC) – Accepted student proposals are announced
May 14 – Coding begins

Personally, we think a particularly useful place to help out would be the Swift Package Manager, and if that sounds interesting here is your mentor:

So, student developers, if you haven’t got a firm résumé-enhancing plan already in place for the summer, we strongly recommend you give very serious thought to the Summer of Code in general, and making Swift better for us all in particular!

Alex | February 21, 2018
Miscellanea
Career Planning: Letter To A Young Developer

So we had this request for advice show up this week, and it strikes us as a good topic for some crowdsourced wisdom from our Dear Readers:

Hello Alex I am currently a senior in high school and want to pursue a career in mobile development after high school.

An excellent choice indeed!

I know the common route most developers take is going to college and obtaining a CS degree but college is very expensive and theory based for a field that doesn’t necessarily require a degree.

Make that ridiculously expensive, in the US these days, and somewhat tenuously connected to skills actually needed for a career in mobile development, this is true.

However, there are a great number of opportunities gated by that credentialism — most notably, it’s far easier to get a job and/or residence abroad if you do have a degree, and we’re big fans of travel as you may notice on our other blog. So before completely dismissing the college option, look into the option of taking a degree program in a country that doesn’t charge US prices, here’s a good looking start we googled up:

Where Can You Study Abroad for Free?

You might also consider looking for universities that offer co-op programs, like our alma mater Simon Fraser University. Having the university place you in work terms makes the financial burden a great deal less, plus once finished you’ll have enough of a résumé to have no problem getting hired — especially since a good co-op program will get you placed at companies far more impressive than you could land on your own; by the time we finished our degree we’d had terms not only in British Columbia where SFU is, but in Ontario, Maryland, and England.

I’ve heard of attending Bootcamps but I’m not sure of the success rate in landing a job afterwards.

From what we gather the majority could be not unfairly characterized as “worthless ripoffs,” yes. And never heard of one we’d recommend for the educational value alone compared to just learning by doing your own projects, which is how we prefer to learn … well, anything, really.

However, we also gather that there are a good number of employers that treat bootcamps as a way of preselecting entry level employees, on the theory that getting through it successfully is as good a screen as their own HR could do; pretty much like the co-op programs we recommended above. So, we do recommend you give the bootcamp thing serious consideration … but only bootcamps that offer 100% refund if you fail to land a job in short order. Here’s a start on that:

Guide to Coding Bootcamps with Job Guarantees – Course Report

What path would you recommend me to take?

Well, if I was a senior in high school right now, what I would personally be doing is throwing up a landing page for some wacky Bright Idea™ and applying for a Thiel Fellowship.

The Thiel Fellowship gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.

College can be good for learning about what’s been done before, but it can also discourage you from doing something new. Each of our fellows charts a unique course; together they have proven that young people can succeed by thinking for themselves instead of competing on old career tracks…

…The hardest thing about being a young entrepreneur is that you haven’t met everyone you’ll need to know to make your venture succeed. We can help connect you — to investors, partners, prospective customers — in Silicon Valley and beyond.

You may have noted above we prefer to learn by doing our own projects? Well, doing our own projects for a couple years with 100 large of Peter Thiel’s money, that strikes us as the best scholarship there is out there.

Failing that, I’d take a look at guaranteed co-op/bootcamp options like we linked to above and see if any of them suited my available financial resources.

And failing that, the next thing I would do is spend full time teaching myself and creating a public profile — which is a good idea to get started on right away no matter what! — but is how you’re going to make up for your lack of experience and credentialism, by substituting with a portfolio and community stature. Here’s a rough outline:

  1. If you don’t have a Github profile, create one now
  2. Start looking for Open Source projects you can contribute to
  3. If you don’t have a Stack Overflow profile, create one now
  4. Start answering questions on Stack Overflow
  5. Build your own mobile projects, open sourced on Github — trivial projects, to start you simply want to show you can ship something
  6. Start a journal somewhere, we like WordPress as you can tell here but Medium seems to be a popular choice in the mobile developer community, and post a couple times a week or so about what you’re learning, the SO questions you’re answering, how you’re approaching your own projects, whatever

Doing that full-time for a couple years, we confidently predict, will

  • teach you much more than any formal education would
  • provide an Open Source portfolio, a much better credential for sensible employers than any piece of paper is
  • do a better job of networking in the community for serendipitous opportunities than any likely school will

If that sounds just a bit overwhelming to go figure out on your own, we also noticed this week a book which looks like a comprehensive guide to exactly what we recommend:

ForgeYourFuture

Forge Your Future with Open Source

Build Your Skills. Build Your Network. Build the Future of Technology

Free and open source is the foundation of software development, and it’s built by people just like you. Discover the fundamental tenets that drive the movement. Take control of your career by selecting the right project to meet your professional goals. Master the language and avoid the pitfalls that typically ensnare new contributors. Join a community of like-minded people and change the world. Programmers, writers, designers, and everyone interested in software will make their mark through free and open source software contributions…

So, although we haven’t read it, just going over the table of contents makes us believe that this would be an excellent $18.95 investment in planning your career, no matter which path you choose to take!

I appreciate you taking time to read my question, thanks!

And you’re very welcome. How about you, Dear Readers? Have any better, or at least different, advice for our young friend?

Alex | February 16, 2018
Miscellanea
2018 iOS Conference Calendar

So since we had such fun with that ARKit speech at MBLTDev in Moscow last fall, we’re thinking of looking for some more exotic conference destinations this year, so let’s see what’s out there for the prospective presenter, shall we?

(Or just to visit, if you’re looking for something vaguely industry-related to justify some extra time off … or are the type that figure an industry conference IS a vacation!)

JANUARY:  (yes, we know it’s over; just making notes for next year)

FEBRUARY:

MARCH:

APRIL:

MAY:

JUNE:

JULY:

AUGUST:

SEPTEMBER:

OCTOBER:

NOVEMBER:

DECEMBER: none yet! 

Anything we missed — let us know! Bit late to be getting started for this year, seeing as how we’re well into February and all … but soon as we hear about CFPs opening up for 2019 conferences, we’ll do another one of these for next year giving you lots of time to submit your papers!

Alex | February 4, 2018
Programming
API 4 IAP PIA: SwiftyStoreKit Seriously Simplifies Subscriptions

There’s been quite a bit of angst and snark recently about what a pain in the fundament it is dealing with IAP subscriptions, you may have noticed:

Testing In-App Purchases Ruins Your Phone

Getting in-app purchases right is a goal that every app developer should have. Your customer’s experience when handing over their money should be seamless. To guarantee a good experience you must rigorously test. However, there are many pain points involved in doing this. Each individual issue is only irritating, but together they create enough friction that properly testing in-app purchases is a miserable experience…

My personal least favorite when working with recurring subscriptions: If you make a test purchase of a recurring subscription, you will be forever presented with a looping App Store login modal, usually when unlocking your phone. This renders any personal device you are testing on ruined… This is a common problem … which some people give short shrift:

My thoughts on the trending iOS subscriptions loop login complaints: read the documentation carefully and follow @Apple best practices. You’ll never encounter this problem.

Well … they’re not quite as clear as all that, really. Here is an excellent guide to the travails you’ll face:

Testing Auto-Renewable Subscriptions on iOS

Subscriptions work differently in TestFlight, the sandbox, and live on the App Store, so testing them requires knowledge of those differences. This is my attempt to help sort out the mess and document it for others to reference…

You definitely want to Read The Whole Thing™ on this one, but we’ll highlight this hack we did not know for testing live subscriptions on the App Store before release! No, really, you can do that:

For an app that has yet to be released on the App Store, getting an early version of the app approved is a great way to test subscriptions:

1. Submit a beta version of the app to App Review. Make sure to set “Version Release” to “Manually release this version” so that the app is not released on the App Store. 2. Generate promo codes for the app. This can be done for free apps that are approved, but not yet on the App Store. 3. Download the app from the App Store using a promo code. 4. Subscribe.

Since this app has gone through approval, subscriptions will perform exactly as they will when the app is live on the App Store, including charging testers who subscribe and allowing testers to manage the subscription in the App Store app. Promo codes can be given to testers so that they can test the app for free. Subscriptions paid for via promo code work exactly like paid subscriptions, except that they don’t auto-renew… Definitely want to make sure you do that. Surprises with your monetization are the worst kind of surprise, amirite?

Now, on the programming side, we feel there’s a clear best practice currently for implementing your StoreKit support in general, but particularly for subscriptions:

SwiftyStoreKit: “Lightweight In App Purchases Swift framework for iOS 8.0+, tvOS 9.0+ and macOS 10.10+”

SwiftyStoreKit Preview

Features:

  • Super easy to use block based API
  • Support for consumable, non-consumable in-app purchases
  • Support for free, auto renewable and non renewing subscriptions
  • Receipt verification
  • iOS, tvOS and macOS compatible

It’s been actively maintained up to 2 days ago as we write this, with 2733 stars on Github and 26,536 installs on CocoaPods.org — it’s healthy to be leery of introducing third party dependencies to essential parts of your app flow, but this one is downright mainstream at this point. And it comes with a complete background education:

Essential Reading

  • Apple – WWDC16, Session 702: Using Store Kit for In-app Purchases with Swift 3
  • Apple – TN2387: In-App Purchase Best Practices
  • Apple – TN2413: In-App Purchase FAQ (also see Cannot connect to iTunes Store)
  • Apple – TN2259: Adding In-App Purchase to Your Applications
  • iTunes Connect Developer Help – Workflow for configuring in-app purchases
  • Apple – About Receipt Validation
  • Apple – Receipt Validation Programming Guide
  • Apple – Validating Receipts Locally
  • Apple – Working with Subscriptions
  • Apple – Offering Subscriptions
  • Apple – Restoring Purchased Products
  • Apple – Testing In-App Purchase Products: includes info on duration of subscriptions in sandbox mode
  • objc.io – Receipt Validation

I have also written about building SwiftyStoreKit on Medium:

  • How I got 1000 ⭐ on my GitHub Project
  • Maintaining a Growing Open Source Project

So there you go, that should be all the resources you need for as painless an IAP implementation as possible!

And while we’re talking about IAP, there is a most excellent article here on design, psychology and strategy:

The Ultimate Guide To Mobile In-App Purchases Optimization

Now you can’t just create in-app purchases in your app haphazardly and let it run itself. It’s a long process that requires blood, sweet, and tears. You need to optimize your in-app purchases to make sure that you’re getting the most that you can out of them.

There are many different models, techniques, and strategies that the top-grossing apps and industry leaders use to optimize their in-app purchases and increase their revenue and we’ll be discussing all of the main and most popular ones… There’s not much here that will be completely new to you, especially if you play those pay-to-win games that have taken over the App Store these days; but it’s nice to have a concise compendium of best practices that’s up to date with iOS 11’s App Store IAP promotions to refer to. Our fave tip:

Purchases IRL

If your mobile app or game becomes big and popular enough, you can use that to offer real-life merchandise through your app. This had been the case with hit mobile games like Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride that sell t-shirts and mugs through their games and Rovio’s Angry Birds that sells t-shirts, hats, toys, LEGO sets, backpacks, and more, and even went on to make an animated series and a full feature movie… That’s an interesting idea actually; if you have all this game art, why not make swag out of it? We do every so often get asked if we have shirts with the Trollsheep on them … maybe we’ll look into that. Especially now that we live in Southeast Asia and all where swag production is a thing!

UPDATES:

Apple Will Reject Your Subscription App if You Don’t Include This Disclosure iOS Subscription Groups Explained Castro 3’s Business Model

AppReceiptValidator: “Parse and validate App Store receipt files.”

iOS Introductory Prices

Alex | January 27, 2018
Tools
CI + CD: Looking For A New Buddy?

So first off, congratulations to our ex-neighbours (before we moved to Bangkok and all) for becoming another Vancouver company acquired by Apple!

The buddybuild team is now part of Apple!

We’re excited to share that the buddybuild team has joined the Xcode engineering group at Apple to build amazing developer tools for the entire iOS community.

We’ve always been proud to be a Canadian company, so we’re also pleased that we will be staying right here in Vancouver — a hotbed of developer and engineering talent.

The buddybuild service will remain available to existing customers to build, test, and ship iOS apps to testers through buddybuild.com…

SWEET! Big win all around, right? Right?

As of today, we are no longer accepting new customers. Existing Free Starter plans and Android app development will be discontinued on March 1, 2018…

… oh. So if you’re a little indie and/or you have an Android version, not so much then.

Well, while we can hope that this promises that our developer memberships may be including some level of CI service in the nearish future, it’s just about a guaranteed certainty that the Android side is about to become just as much a dimly remembered history as that of TestFlight. Looks like just about the same scenario in fact, only difference this time is they announced Apple’s acquisition first!

So, let’s take a look around at what options there are for the indie developer who feels the pain of those free + Android plans going away, shall we?

Here is one particular instance of that discussion being conducted online, as an issue for GitHawk:

Alternatives to Buddybuild? #1330

We will almost certainly lose support for this project. Time to find a new CI. Any suggestions?
I’m reading this article which offers:

• Bitrise
• Travis CI
• Nevercode
• CircleCI

I read about Buildkite and AppCenter on Hacker News.

I’m also considering open source, self-hosted solutions so that something like this doesn’t happen again:

• Drone
• Jenkins

Read through the whole discussion there: other options that showed up were

No strong consensus there, although Bitrise and Circle have positive buzz and Travis doesn’t, that’s what stands out.

Circle has an article here:

Migrating from buddybuild to CircleCI

If you enjoy managing everything with fastlane, looks like that’s the service for you. Those of us who want the magic to just work, we’ll keep looking a bit.

Here’s another fellow who went through the evaluation process and came up with a surprising answer:

Exploring Alternatives to buddybuild

In the end, I chose to go with GitLab CI. GitLab CI works very similarly to BuildKite: it merely coordinates a set of agents (“runners” in GitLab parlance), who are responsible for the actual building of the project. I’m already running a GitLab server to host my Git repositories, so using it for CI didn’t require any new installation or setup for my existing repositories…

… As I said above, GitLab CI is almost certainly not the right solution for your case. It’s the right solution for me, because a) it’s cheap, b) I was already running a GitLab server, and c) none of the other alternatives fit my needs quite as well.

OK, if you’re using GitLab, self-hosted or not, that looks like the really obvious choice!

How to set up GitLab CI for iOS in three relatively simple steps

While GitLab is a fascinating option, we expect that Github is where indie projects are likeliest to live … ours, anyways. And, as you may remember, we were kinda impressed with Microsoft’s plans for Visual Studio App Center, and haven’t had any reason to go back on that since. And in what is possibly not a complete coincidence, they recently posted

Build Any App with Visual Studio App Center

At Microsoft, we strive to deliver the best developer tools on the planet in order to help make all developers more productive. With Visual Studio App Center, you can easily automate your DevOps lifecycle to continuously build, test, release, and monitor your apps on every platform, so you have more time to focus on your users and their experience.

The App Center Build service is completely free for your first 240 build minutes per month (up to 30 minutes per build) and supports iOS, macOS, Windows, and, of course, Android apps.

App Center supports apps written in Obj-C, Swift, Java, React Native, and Xamarin, and integrates with existing tools such as GitHub, Visual Studio Team Services, and Bitbucket. Once you’ve selected your repository, setting up build automation for any branch of your desktop and mobile apps takes just a few clicks. Additionally, App Center Build includes other cloud services, so you can run UI tests to retain the highest quality standards and distribute your apps to testers…

That’s the one we’re going to try next, personally; find out for ourselves just how usable in practice App Center is, because it sure looks like the best multiplatform development support out there, and one that we can trust has just about as low a probability as possible of being acquired or discontinued … which seems to occur with depressing regularity to these tools of ours, doesn’t it now?

And as a parting note, here’s some more informed commentary and interesting speculation for WWDC 2018. Cloud Xcode Server would certainly be nice!

Apple Acquires BuddyBuild. Oh, My Xcode Server!

UPDATES:

Adding GitLab CI Support (followup to Exploring Alternatives to buddybuild)

Continuous integration and delivery with fastlane and CircleCI

Why XOD switched from Travis to Circle CI

Looking for Buddybuild Alternatives? Try App Center

Three Quick Tips: Signing Your iOS Apps with Visual Studio App Center Build

Alex | January 18, 2018
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