MacKuba

One of the things that caught my attention in the WWDC videos I watched last week were the improvements in the notification system, meant to on one hand give more control over notifications to the users and make them a bit less overwhelming, and on the other hand make them more useful by allowing them to be more interactive.

I’ve tried to sum up here all the changes related to notifications that I’ve found – there’s nothing here that you can’t find by yourself in the videos, but I figured it’s worth putting it all in one place in a concise form.

Most of the below applies to both iOS 12 and watchOS 5.

Apart from a whole bunch of new frameworks (see the whole list here), iOS 11 also makes some major changes to existing APIs. One of the affected areas is location tracking. If your app only uses location while the app is in the foreground, as most apps do, you might not have to change anything at all; however, if it’s one of those apps that continuously track user’s location throughout the day, you should probably book some time this summer for making some changes in how you do the tracking and testing possible usage scenarios.

This post is mostly based on the “What’s New in Location Technologies” talk from WWDC, so if this topic is relevant to you then you should definitely watch the whole talk.

It’s that time of the year again – if you’re like me, you’ve probably spent a lot of time in the last few weeks following everything that’s been announced at WWDC, digging into release notes, watching WWDC talks and playing with some cool new stuff. And as usually, the amount of new things to process is pretty overwhelming.

So like in the last two years, I’ve prepared a nicely organized list for you of all the things I could find from various sources: all the user-facing features in macOS/iOS/watchOS/tvOS, and all new frameworks, APIs and improvements in their respective SDKs and Apple’s developer tools.

To get more info about any specific thing, follow the links above the sections to Apple’s developer site and the “What’s New” documentation, download the release notes from developer.apple.com, and of course use the freshly redesigned unofficial WWDC Mac app to watch the talks that you’re interested in.

If you want to catch up on last year’s notes (e.g. to see what you can use if you drop iOS 9 support in your app), check out these posts:

• WWDC 2016
• WWDC 2015

Following the tradition from last year, here’s my complete list of all interesting features and updates I could find in Apple’s OSes, SDKs and developer tools that were announced at this year’s WWDC. This is based on the keynotes, the “What’s New In …” presentations and some others, Apple’s release notes, and blog posts and tweets that I came across in the last few weeks.

If for some reason you haven’t watched the talks yet, I really recommend watching at least the “State of the Union” and the “What’s New In” intros for the platforms you’re interested in. The unofficial WWDC Mac app is great way to download the videos and keep track of what you’ve already watched.

If you’re interested, here are my WWDC 2015 notes (might be useful if you’re planning to drop support for iOS 8 now and start using some iOS 9 APIs).

(This was originally posted on Gist at https://gist.github.com/mackuba/e8fb4219c7ef611f47cdb66b93986d85.)

Here’s my own list of the interesting stuff announced during this year’s WWDC, collected from the keynotes, various Apple docs, blog posts and tweets.

If you’re planning to watch the videos, I really recommend this Mac app that helps you download and watch them: https://github.com/insidegui/WWDC.

(This was originally posted on Gist at https://gist.github.com/mackuba/15994186a4f9d7da3137.)

In iOS 8 Apple made some changes to how apps are supposed to request access to location data. If you use CLLocationManager and you don’t make any changes for iOS 8 compatibility, your app might stop receiving location data at all.

Permission types

The biggest change is that apps can now ask to get location data either “Always” or “While Using”:

This is the first part of a new (hopefully) longer series of tutorial-like posts. I’m planning to write shorter posts now but more often, based on specific things that I learn while working on my current projects. Let’s see how long I manage to keep this going… :)

Let’s say you have an iOS app that was build for iPhone 5S and earlier. Now that the new iPhones are out, you want to make it work on them too.

If you don’t change anything and just build your app with the latest Xcode and iOS SDK, you’ll see that the app runs on the new iPhones scaled up: the views are rendered on a standard iPhone 5S sized screen and then resized to a bigger resolution like you would resize a static image, together with the top/bottom bars and everything (which obviously doesn’t look good).

To make the app render on the new iPhones natively, you need to let iOS know that it supports them. There are two ways to do that:

Here are my notes from the Mobile Mobile Conf that took place in Kraków this week. I just wrote down what I heard, so it might not be completely correct, but I figured it will still be useful.