In a quick update from last week, Microsoft announced the most sweeping layoffs they've ever done, with a total impact of over 18,000 jobs, plus an unknown number of contractors. Of course, in classic Microsoft fashion, they announced 2/3s of the layoffs last week, with the other 6,000 looming over the heads of remaining employees like a Damoclean sword. If Microsoft's senior management thinks this will help improve productivity, they've got another thing coming. Uncertainty will serve only to erode morale within the company, and cause further brain-drain to the other big tech companies here in the Seattle area. I'm sure Google, Facebook, and Amazon recruiters are salivating at the prospect of picking up hundreds of Microsoft employees who've had enough.
On a lighter note, I wanted to talk a bit about iBeacon and other location-based technologies. Apple didn't make any big announcements about the technology during the WWDC keynote, but iOS 8 seems to offer a new feature that should drastically improve the ability of companies to funnel users into their apps. Of course, there are a few problems with this approach:
- The vast majority of businesses lack the resources to build an iPhone app.
- I sincerely doubt that your average user has any interest in installing a new app for every restaurant they walk into.
Fortunately, it looks like there is a meaningful alternative that sidesteps both of these issues: Passbook. If you're anything like me, you haven't had many opportunities to use Passbook. Maybe you've bought coffee with it at Starbucks, or boarded a US domestic flight by using a QR code on a Passbook pass. I think that Passbook has been woefully underadopted by developers and businesses. It offers a cheap and easy way for a business to get a persistent user interface onto a user's device, offer push notifications and show alerts based upon the user's current location. The only really tricky thing about Passbook passes has been figuring out how to get them onto a user's device, but—as it turns out—you can send a Passbook pass to a user's phone via MMS. Passbook passes can, in turn, be displayed on user's lock screens via proximity to an iBeacon.
Are you working with iBeacon and/or Passbook? What have your experiences been with the technologies?
Until next time,
Aaron
Control of the Week
ISHPermissionKit
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A unified way for iOS apps to request user permissions. This framework provides a unified way of asking for user permissions on iOS. It also provides UI to explain the permission requirements before presenting the user with the system permission dialogue. This allows the developer to postpone the system dialogue. The framework provides no actual chrome, leaving the developer and designer in charge of creating the views. While you can use this framework to ask for a user's permission to multiple things at the same time and out of context, you should continue to ask for permission only when the app needs it. However there might be occassions, where multiple permissions are required at the same time: e.g. when starting to record location and motion data. This framework also provides explicit ways to ask for the user's permission where the systems APIs only provide implicit methods of doing so. BSD licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
NSString+EmailAddresses
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An Objective C category to validate and fix common typos in email addresses. Significantly reduces signup issues and lost users in your iOS apps. Fixes misspelled variations for Gmail, Googlemail, Hotmail, Yahoo and Ymail. More domains can be added easily using a dictionary syntax. Some examples of bad email addresses that will be corrected: MIT licensed. |
VMMultiHandleSlider
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A mimic of iPhoto's multi-handle slider. For more information, please check the github repo. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
VMBrushImageView
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Brush foreground and background on a NSImageView. For more information, please refer to https://github.com/void-main/VMBrushImageView. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
AmbientStatus
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Seamlessly update your app based on your user's ambient data (transit, battery, and location statuses). MIT licensed. |
SWRevealTableViewCell
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SWRevealTableViewCell is UITableViewCell subclass to easily display left and right buttons based on user pan gestures. Similar to the mail app and but with enhanced features. Done right! MIT licensed. |
At Mentions
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TweetBot like @Mentions Apache 2.0 licensed. |
JSKit
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JSKit is a framework for iOS. Classes:
Categories:
MIT licensed. |
MZDownloadManager
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This download manager uses NSURLSession api to download files. It can download multiple files at a time. It can download large files if app is in background. It can resume downloads if app was quit. BSD licensed. |
DSDynamicScrollView
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iOS component for building dynamic and animated UIScrollView. License unspecified. |
Wyrd
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Wyrd is a library for asynchronous programming in Swift. It aims to be concise and simple. Wyrd is inspired by Promises/A+. Both Swift and Cocoa Touch doesn't provide any helpers for asynchronous programming besides standard functions taking success/failure callbacks. Wyrd tries to alleviate this with fairly simple API and a few helpers of its own. MIT licensed. |
FSParallaxTableView
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Parallax effect for images in table view cells MIT licensed. |