40: Tapping on Their Wrists in Morse Code

Ben is back, and the couch dives into the September Apple event to try and determine what the future of development is going to be like with bigger screens, extensions that live on your wrist and the idea of connected devices. Apple Pay is being rolled out in America first, but when can Australia expect to see it? More importantly, what sort of impact will it have, given that Google Wallet, it’s closest competitor, completely fizzled? The iPhone now has much larger screen sizes, with the iPhone 6 coming in a 4.7” and 5.5” models, meaning that app creators will be forced to rethink the location of buttons and use of gestures. This also means that layout related calculations will have different implications, with the 5.5” model using different size classes to the iPhones that have come before it. When discussion turns to the downsampling performed by the iPhone 6 plus, Jake takes the opportunity to bring up Auto Layout, and how to create proportional width constraints. Jelly counters with his own math based solution used to layout the collection view in GIFwrapped. The most frustrating thing, however, is Apple’s solution to declaring support for the larger devices: detecting the presence of correctly sized launch images (of which there are now 20), or the use of a launch screen xib. The couch discusses the purpose of these and whether the issues they’ve seen with getting apps working across all devices. Discussion then turns to the Apple Watch, and how this could be the launching point for a morse code resurgence. Jelly then turns the discussion to development, and with very little to go on, suggest the possibility that Apple Watch “apps” might end up as little more than extensions of apps on your iPhone. From there, discussion turns to the Taptic Engine and its future as a feedback mechanism. When combined with iBeacons and other methods of detecting the world around you, will the watch become a player in giving you the ability to interact with the world around you? Just to top off the episode, Jelly discusses his image caching adventures, discussing the pros and cons of three third-party image caching libraries: SDWebImage, Haneke and Path’s Fast Image Cache.