iOS & Android Development

The busiest season on the App Store is almost here. Make sure your apps are up-to-date and ready for the winter holidays. New apps and app updates will not be accepted December 22-29, so any releases should be submitted, approved, and scheduled in advance. Other iTunes Connect functionality will remain available. Apple Developer News

One language to rule them all. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could develop every aspect of your apps, front and back end, all using Swift™? We think so. That’s the vision behind Perfect. Perfect is the first enterprise-grade web server and web toolkit for the Swift programming language. If you’re already developing in Swift and you need backend server software, Perfect eliminates the need to choose and learn a backend language by allowing you to use Swift for all your coding. Perfect.org

Swiftline is a set of tools to help you create command line applications. Swiftline is inspired by highline. Swiftline can be divided to three main parts: Colorize: Helps adding colors to strings written to the terminal Ask , Choose and agree: Easily create prompt for asking the user more info Run: A quick way to run an external command and read its standard output and standard error. GitHub

threadingText is a JavaScript jQuery plugin to enable thread text in HTML. With a responsive web design and dynamic content using thread text is hard to achieve; here is where threadingText comes into play. The jQuery plugin threadingText provides a nice way of dynamically associate and fill HTML in pre-defined text containers and cut overlapping text with a specified ending symbol (default is " ...") or create new text containers according to a specified prototype text container if text would exceed provided space. The implementation uses a binary text length search to divide the HTML among the text containers provided. While doing so it tries its best to repair any HTML tags beeing broken while threading the HTML in the text containers. Additionally many code hooks are provided, where you can interfere in the layouting process and adjust the results in any way. GitHub

Intents and Extensions I have been focused primarily on the Android platform for about 5 years, so the Intents framework is pretty much a part of my DNA at this point. When Twitter went aflame with “iOS has Intents! #WWDC” tweets during last week’s keynote, I sat up and took notice. Could it be? What follows are the things I have observed about what the two frameworks now have in common, and where they divide. Wires Are Obsolete App Extension Programming Guide Starting in iOS 8.0 and OS X v10.10, an app extension lets you extend custom functionality and content beyond your app and make it available to users while they’re using other apps or the system. You create an app extension to enable a specific task; after users get your extension, they can use it to perform that task in a variety of contexts. For example, if you provide an extension that enables sharing to your social sharing website, users can use it to post a remark while surfing the web. Or if you provide an extensio...

Fragmentation is both a strength and weakness of the Android ecosystem, a headache for developers that also provides the basis for Android’s global reach. Android devices come in all shapes and sizes, with vastly different performance levels and screen sizes. Furthermore, there are many different versions of Android that are concurrently active at any one time, adding another level of fragmentation. What this means is that developing apps that work across the whole range of Android devices can be extremely challenging and time-consuming. There is also a nice comparison with iOS! OpenSignal