45: Cynical About a Lot of Things

Ben rejoins the couch from London, and Jake discusses his beacon woes, some tips and tricks he’s picked up while developing with Swift, and the recent open-sourcing of .Net frameworks by Microsoft. Following up on the discussion from the last episode, the couch talks about a possible alternative for finding things near you without requiring location services: requesting postcodes, or using a geocoding service to search for locations. At the mention of London, Ben chimes in to talk about his experience trying to attend NSLondon. Jake and Jelly fill him in on the surprisingly official Cocoaheads that Jake presented at. This brings up a bet that they’ve made about whether it’s possible to have a paged collection view that shows peeks of the previous and next page. Jake believes it’s not possible without hacks, and Jelly thinks he can find a way. Getting back on topic, Jake expresses his frustration that the proposed idea doesn’t really solve his dilemma with ranging for beacons in the background, and this leads to an exploration of what the real problem is with the scenario: the message that users get to remind them about the monitoring of locations in the background that is presented without context, and even if the beacons haven’t triggered the app. Moving on to Swift, Jake weighs in on his thoughts about Swift and whether it is, in fact falling out of favour. With that in mind, he decides to share some things that he’s picked up in the past few weeks that might help others: how to concisely unwrap multiple optionals simultaneously, mutating arrays, dealing with implicitly returning single line closures, and detecting when collection view cells have been reused. Finally, the couch talks about Microsoft’s recent move to open-source .Net on Github, and what effect that could have on the Apple development community. Jake spends a lot of of the discussion dreaming about what it would be like if Apple open-sourced some of its core libraries, giving Jelly’s cynicism a good solid workout.