I’m converting code for my first book to Swift 3. It uses Cocoa Bindings a lot, including NSTreeController. Now the compiler changed; and one of the issues I faced was working with the NSTreeController.arrangedObjects. The compiler assumed a wrong type of the children property (see the docs) and reported “Ambiguous use of ‘children’”.
Last week, Red Queen Coder’s blog post about iOS job interviews was discussed a lot. The interviewers asked her to sketch how to implement a linked list on a whiteboard. She couldn’t. And thinks it is pointless. (I agree.) But then people on social media responded that she should just learn (that is: memorize) that kind of stuff to get a good job. Read her transcript, it’s a well-written story of how a job interview and the onslaught by narrow-minded people who defend the status quo (and their own status as the establishment) made her wonder what’s wrong with the community at large.
The folks at Swifting.io wrote a blog post about iOS software architectures. The comparison of VIPER and Clean Swift/VIP is very interesting: the VIP approach favors uni-directional flow, which I like very much. The article is worth a read for that alone!
They falsely consider MVC and MVVM to be software architecture approaches, though, and too point out that MVVM and MVC suffer from similar drawbacks.
I just grokked how value transformations can not be a pain in tests. I’m writing a simple export module which takes a table from TableFlip and renders it as LaTeX. So the input is a Table and the output a String. But the module is not just a single function, mind you. That’d be a huge function, and not very open for configuration changes later. I factored it into a few sub-components, of course.
When facing a legacy code base, changing the mess to an orderly architecture can cause confusion: where to start? What to do? An exemplary question: How do I refactor a Big Ball of Mud into layered architecture? Refactoring the existing code base seems like a logical step; after all, refactorings are designed to improve existing code, and improvement is what you’re up to.
Picking up on my post “MVVM Is Quite Okay at What It Is Supposed to Do”, here’s a few images which illustrate the problem of mistaking MVVM for a solution to a structural problem. It’s the whole post in 2 images. Model–View–View-Model helps with the view layer. It can be a tool to break up a view controller into smaller things. But it’s still only a refactoring of view components into more objects.
Dash was removed from the macOS and iOS App Stores: Apple terminated the developer’s account without further notice and does not provide additional information.
This is a very sad thing to happen to Bogdan Popescu, sole developer of Dash: as far as I can tell, Dash is the only app he is selling at the moment, and now the exclusive iOS store was taken from him. The macOS App Store was probably more lucrative for Bogdan than selling licences on his own – at least that’s what other developers consistently report when they sell on both platforms.
So here’s another reason why Apple’s App Stores are risky for developers. Not only will search ads skew the results. And not only do you have to make up for the 30% cut by Apple. Developers have no way to defend themselves against giants like Apple (or Amazon in the realm of books, for that matter). There’s no separation of powers. The companies own these channels. It feels weird that they can do as they please, but there’s nothing to complain, really.
The power of the customer is limited, too. Do you know anybody who doesn’t have a strong opinion why his smartphone is better than someone else’s? Anybody who would switch platforms at will? Who won’t lose anything in the process or find it painful? – I don’t, and so there’s no real pressure for Apple in the long run. Not paying for the next iPhone and using Android instead is not an option for most iPhone users. It’s probably even worse with Macs. I wouldn’t want to use a Windows or a Linux PC if I can help it.
I pushed the button. Now TableFlip is here! TableFlip is a text-based visual table editor. It will become your go-to application to edit tabular data because it’s blazingly fast, lightweight, and fun to use. You can use it to quickly create tables from scratch and copy the result anywhere – or you can use it to edit tables in existing documents. That’s what “flipping” stands for:
So now you can place ads for your app to pop up in search results.
I don’t like this move. Because it changes the chances of developers to make it in the list of search results. The App Store’s aren’t a great place to discover a fitting solution. Now, the search results aren’t even guaranteed to be 100% relevant.
If I had the money, I’d use Search Ads to try to increase my revenue. Without money, you’re screwed, though.
At least the pricing sounds good: you pay for a tap and you can put a daily cap on your ad budget. So literally everyone can try to use Search Ads to increase the odds. The thing is that each tap is priced according to the market, though. If your competitors are willing to spend a lot more than you, chances are a limited budget will not make it:
You determine the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a tap on your ad. Using a second price auction, Search Ads calculates the actual cost of a tap based on what your nearest competitor is willing to pay for a tap on their ad, up to your maximum cost-per-tap bid, so you’ll always pay a fair market price. (Source)
Apart from the amount of fairness of pricing and other technical details, I find the very move to place Search Ads in the App Stores troubling in itself.