Mobile Couch

Creating great apps for Apple’s mobile devices.

This podcast is no longer in production.

42: It’ll Be Great… Next Year

Published 13 October 2014 • Hosted by Ben Trengrove, Daniel “Jelly” Farrelly and Jake MacMullin

Jelly is working on a big update for GIFwrapped, which prompts discussion with Ben and Jake about getting validation from shipping something cool, designing for single handed use, iOS8 extensions and rotation based on size classes.

Jake retouches on the topic of diversity and gender equality in tech, mentioning the recently funded CODE documentary, and Annabel Crabb’s new book, The Wife Drought, which looks at both sides of the issues regarding flexible workplaces.

Jelly talks about his recent experiences working on the next major GIFwrapped update, and how you need some form of validation to stay positive about a project, whether it be from implementing a cool little feature, having people see your well structured code, or from seeing a drop in crashes in the shipped product.

The couch then talks about designing for multiple screen sizes, like using larger phones with one hand, and how app designers and developers can add little touches to allow users to perform tasks without having to move the phone around too much. Plus, dealing with landscape orientation on various devices and thinking about all the different size, and shape, screens.

iOS8 shipped alongside a plethora of third-party keyboards and a new layout on the iPhone 6 plus landscape keyboard, and the couch spends some time discussing the downsides and decisions made about those keyboards; the first-load experience, additional buttons and the installation experience. Ben also talks about the limitations when creating extensions and how to pass data back and forth between your extension and your app.

The new API for checking your version number in iOS8 doesn’t actually work for version prior to iOS8, and this prompts a discussion of versioning and migrations, how it works, and the best way to implement them in your app, from clearing caches between versions to migrating Core Data stores from one version to another.

Ben talks about image feature detection, such as face and blink detection, in Core Image, and how to crop an image to show a person’s face, which is really easy and impresses Jake quite a bit. Jake then talks about taking that image and caching it with HanekeSwift, a generic, Swift implementation of the Haneke image cache.

Finally, Jelly brings up his attempts to autorotate based on possible size classes, to only allow landscape mode on devices which use a regular size class in that orientation, and Jake pulls a solution out of one of the WWDC sessions from earlier this year.

Download Audio (37.24 MB)

Show Notes