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Offline-First: No More Network Connection Error

The Internet seems to be always available nowadays. Thanks to the mobility of phones and tablets, mobile app developers can design their apps with a variety of features that assume the Internet connection is stable and let users experience tithe unleash the power of the convenient and efficient network services. Social media apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are good examples. However, how would theses apps function when there is no stable internet connection?

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Journey Through Agile Test Automation

For QA in an agile development team, SPEED is everything. It is a game on a high-speed roundabout, developers introduce new features and fixes every day, and you better test everything before the next iteration. Besides the new features or fixes, you still need to handle a full UI regression smoke test, how is that possible? Hire more staff? Test automation is a way out for smart teams, and that’s what we do at Oursky.
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Manage your AppStore Preview Images in one place – make your life easier with ShotBot

You’ve been working hard preparing for your launch to AppStore. The final step is getting it submitted to iTunesConnect.

GIFCAM-iTunesConnet

You have to fill in the app details, upload the app icon, localized descriptions and preview images— upload them one-by-one going through your list of localizations for each supported device in English; one-by-one for each device in French; one-by-one for each device in German, etc, etc.
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OK, 13 languages.

You have to upload screenshots one-by-one for each device, for each locale. Oh that’s O(n²)

Let’s say you have built an awesome app for iPhone & iPad and now it’s ready for launch.

Question, how many preview images exactly do you have to add?

The answer is simple. For each locale, there are 3.5-inch, 4-inch, 4.7-inch, 5.5-inch and iPad screenshots (and don’t forget the upcoming iPad Pro). There are 5 images in each set, that gives you 5 x 5 = 25 pcs for each locale.

Needless to say, you will have to organize 25 x 13 = 325 preview images to iTunesConnect. Sounds scary right?

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Spentable (Expense Tracker): How we built our first app for watchOS 2

Spentable: How we built our first app for watchOS 2

In WWDC2015, Apple announced iOS 9 for iPhone and watchOS 2 for iWatch. It has been a huge revamp for watchOS. Not until now, a watch app finally runs natively on the watch.

That means the code is now executing on your watch instead of the phone. By reducing multiple times of data transfer between devices, this is going to make the app loads a lot quicker and responds in a shorter period of waiting time.

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VIPER – iOS App Architecture Beyond MVC (Mega-ViewController)

The MVC Architecture is generally used in developing iOS applications.

However the “ViewController” approach widely used is the most evil part that messes up Views and Controllers: Developer writes both view animation and business logic in the UIViewController, hence introducing a MEGA-ViewController.

In this passage, we will share our experience on how VIPER saves our lives from this monster in one of our projects.

VIPER is not a framework  but an approach to iOS application architecture, which stands for:

  • View
  • Interactor
  • Presenter
  • Entity
  • Routing(Wireframe)

The “MVC” monster

mega-viewcontroller monsterTypical Model objects are simple, they are just NSManagedObject.

View and Controller are wrapped in a single UIViewController class. The UIViewController class constraints the fundamental view management of the iOS app. As the name convention suggests,  view controllers often handle both business logics and logics for responding to user interactions.

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