App Success
How One Dev Quit His Job To Make A Living On The App Store
Many of us have heard the success story of A Dark Room before. Amir has been on several podcasts over the last couple years sharing his story (a great one was Entreprogrammers). In this Reddit post, he details his numbers and gives some excellent advice on working with Apple for a feature, how to actually make money with apps, and what kind of apps people actually want. This post is full of many gems. Did you know you probably won't get a feature unless you are localized?
Quit my full time corporate job. Built an iOS game... by Amir Rajan
Swift
These One Liners Are No Joke
Umberto shows us some short handy snippets we can add to our Swift library. I personally like the discussion on #3, "Verify If Exists In A String".
10 Swift One Liners To Impress Your Friends by Umberto Raimondi
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Indie DevStock - A New Developer Conference
Indie DevStock is a new developer conference being held in Nashville, Tennessee September 16-17, 2016.
But it’s not just for indie developers. If you want to learn more about iOS, Apple Watch, Apple TV or Mac development you’re welcome — and encouraged — to attend. While we do have some code-focused tech talks, Indie DevStock focuses on more than just code. It’s a great opportunity to meet new friends, inspire creativity and share new ideas.
Why Indie DevStock?
At Indie DevStock, you’ll have the opportunity to meet some great people with whom you share common interests. You’ll enjoy fantastic food, excellent music and experience the finest in Southern hospitality. And who knows? Perhaps new ideas and epic partnerships will form.
Indie DevStock; organized by women — created for everyone!
Tips
What Swift Beginners Should Learn First
In our #iOSStack-friends slack group this week, a member asked what they should learn first. Dominik had a great response and turned it into a blog post.
Using Anchors With Auto Layout
This is a great tip to save you some headaches when working with NSLayoutConstraint. Anchors can really clean up your code!
Recipe: Using Anchors to Place Views in iOS by Roadfire Software
Tutorials
Getting Started With HealthKit
If you've been looking to explore HealthKit, AppCoda has a nice tutorial on tracking your walking distance. Access has improved since HealthKit's release and it's not that difficult to pull data into your app. Though the fitness category is very competitive, I believe there is room for niche apps to incorporate HealthKit data and provide unique services for users.
Building a Fitness App Using HealthKit to Track Walking Distance by Matthew Maher with AppCoda
watchOS
Should You Add Apple Watch Support To Your App?
Where are we at with the Apple Watch? What does it do well? Where does it fail? Richard breaks down these questions and more, giving you an idea of what kinds of apps you should avoid or pursue with the watch. He argues that if your app doesn't provide frequently updated information that can be presented in a compact form, you may want to skip the watch and focus on making the best iOS app you can.
Resources
An Indispensable NSDateFormatter Site
Cool site to straighten you out when you are struggling with NSDateFormatter. Be sure to bookmark this one.
Code
Have You Been Ignoring Memory Leaks?
Who has time to manually track down memory leaks when you just want to make the best app you can? With ARC, many developers don't even think about memory until their app starts filling the console with warnings or their app crashes. Facebook has released a suite of tools to allow you to automate the process of finding memory leaks.
Career
Don't Quit Your Day Job Just Yet
I believe in following your dreams. I also believe that at some point you have to make the jump if you want to work for yourself. I'm doing just that in June. But, as Jeff points out in this post, it wouldn't be smart for me to go independent without planning ahead of time. The trick is to plan your income stream(s) enough beforehand to ease the transition. But, if you spend all your time planning, you'll be paralyzed and never actually quit your job. I hope I have enough planned out for my jump! (so does my wife)
Why Quitting Your Job to Chase Your Dream Is a Terrible Idea by Jeff Goins
Let Your Brain Code During Your Break
Love this article about taking breaks to be more productive. I've been trying to take five-minute breaks every 40 minutes for a while now using Time Out on my Mac. I don't always succeed, but I definitely believe in stepping away from work for a bit to refocus. I feel like I often solve tough issues in the back of my head while I'm on that break. Plus it's great for getting the blood flowing.
If You Want To Be More Productive, Research Shows You Need A Break by Darius Foroux
I guess the big news I saw this week was the possibility of paid search on the App Store. I purposely don't read into speculation. Until I know something is actually going to happen I tend to mostly ignore it. I don't think it's all doom and gloom, though. Seems the apps that would pay for search results are already the same ones that spend thousands to get the ranking in the first place. Regular devs already aren't competing with them. With paid search, you might be able to get your app to rank higher over a crappy app that hasn't been updated in years!
Have some great links and sponsors. Appfigures just released a new way to monitor reviews and it looks awesome. And be sure to read the first link all the way through. It's a crash course in app success! - @cdbeshore