When Apple revealed the iPhone X with a top “notch” and bottom home screen indicator the reason behind some SDK changes at WWDC 2017 became clearer. Safe area layout guides may help but there are still some gotchas for table/collection views and the search bar.
Read On →Apple added PDF vector images to the Xcode asset catalog in Xcode 6. It is a convenient way to build the image assets at 1x, 2x and 3x resolution without the pain of manually creating each file. What it did not do was give you truly scaleable vector images. Stretching an image above its base size left you with some ugly, fuzzy results.
That changes with Xcode 9 with the possibility to keep the vector data and scale images at runtime. It also adds some accessibility improvements which work well alongside dynamic type.
Read On →Swift 4 and iOS 11 brings us the Codable protocol as a way to convert a type to and from an external format. The most popular format may be JSON but it also works great for old school Cocoa property lists.
Using a custom font with dynamic type has always been possible but it took some effort to get it to scale for each text style as the user changed the dynamic type size. Apple introduced a new font metrics class in iOS 11 that makes it much less painful.
Read On →If you rely on hiding the status bar to avoid conflicting with system gestures at the screen edges you will need to make some changes when updating for iOS 11. Apple no longer assumes your app wants to override system gestures at the edges when you hide the status bar. Instead you need to tell the system directly which edges you want first shot at handling gestures for.
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