One of my esteemed work colleagues at Upthere, Inc., the granola-obsessive Kelan Champagne posted about using a little-known Swift “feature” where you can use willSet/didSet property observing syntax on local variables.
This is the kind of weird niche feature that has you reaching for oblique use cases where it might just be useful or turn into a new discovery that becomes something the provides useful new patterns in the future…
Everybody’s talking about the Apple Watch around the anniversary of its first release. Most of the chatter is about how disappointing and how slow it is, with some countering with how useful it is despite this.
I am in agreement with most of these viewpoints, but people who don’t think this is going to change radically in the next year or two are crazy. You only have to look at the utility gulf between a first-generation iPhone and the iPhone 4 to see this.
At the beautiful rural co-working space that I run, my iOS App development company will be hosting a free WWDC keynote party here in Chalford near Stroud in England (I have to keep saying this because we keep getting people applying from America).
This is a repeat of events we’ve held for major Apple announcements for the last two years, but bigger and better thanks to the new co-working studio we have.
If you are in the vicinity and want to hang out with some nice friendly iOS and Mac devs, as well as people generally interested in the Apple platforms please grab a ticket.
Since the improvements to Touch ID you see many people complaining that they press the Home button to see the lock screen to catch some missed push notification or check the time, and it instead unlocks the phone. The new Apple TV remote has a nice feature where the Apple TV itself dims the display when inactive, and “wakes” up brighter when you lift the remote. Obviously this is using the accelerometers in the remote. Wouldn’t it be great if the iPhone did this to reveal the lock screen?
If Apple made this relatively simple change to iOS, the iPhone could wake up the display when you lift it. To avoid wasting battery all the time by lighting up in your pocket, it should constrain it so that it only does this when the phone is facing up, and the movement was in the upward direction, or when the phone was perpendicular to the ground (in a pocket) and moved to be upward facing.
The pace of change, the reliable yearly cycles, they are hard to keep up with. However I just can’t deny that iOS dev is also consistently exciting. You know there’s cool new stuff coming all the time and a world of interesting possibilities that can affect a huge number of people in the world.
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