43: I Made That Button, Mum

Jane Abernethy — part of the iOS development team at the Commonwealth Bank in Sydney — joins the couch to fill in for the globetrotting Ben, and to talk about her work, her team and IBDesignables. Also, follow up. Lots and lots of follow up. After attempting to convince Jake to use 1Password, Jelly talks about his internet troubles, and Jake follows up on his endeavours to get VDSL installed as mentioned in last week’s episode. Jane introduces herself and talks a little about how she got started as an iOS developer, which leads into a discussion of why each of the couch got into development in the first place, and what made the iPhone such an exciting device to make apps for. Jane talks about how it feels great that her mum uses the app she works on, but it’s frustrating that she hasn’t updated from iOS 6 yet, and the whole couch joins together in a chorus of sorrow about supporting older iOS versions. Delving into follow up, Jelly attempts to finalise the pronunciation of Haneke, and communicates the differences between the Objective C and Swift versions. Jake follows up on his previous follow up regarding gender diversity in tech by mentioning a Planet Money episode that discusses the history of the topic. This prompts much awkwardness, and then discussion of said awkwardness. Finally, Jelly follows up on the topic of today extensions, and how they communicate with their parent app. Returning to the topic of supporting older iOS versions, the couch talks about what versions it’s worth supporting with releases and what the 6% of users that aren’t using iOS 7 actually means. Jake mentions that it feels like this change to iOS 8 feels a lot harder to support alongside older version because of the sheer number of new features. Almost two-thirds of the way through the episode, Jake finally gets to ask Jane a few questions about her work, and what the differences between her current role at the Commonwealth Bank and her previous role at a digital advertising agency in Sydney are like. Jake also asks whether Jane’s team is looking at Swift at this point, and though they aren’t really, this prompts a discussion about IBDesignables with Interface Builder, which Jane has been exploring. Finally, Jake looks for a solution to a tableview that feels too cramped on the larger iPhone 6 plus, and Jelly tries to talk him out of detecting the device model with two lines of CGRect-based code. But will he listen? Tune in next time to find out!