Shut up and listen

Jeroen Leenarts: Hi, and welcome to episode six of my podcast. My name is Leenarts and I've been developing iOS apps for over eight years and I'm running the Dutch cocoa for over seven in this episode's going to talk about the interesting news and articles of the last seven days I will also share some information about my mailing list. I've been working on it over the weekends, make sure that I switched from MailChimp to Sandy. And this gives me more control over the data. In my newsletter, I will also share future plans from a podcast. Later this week, I will publish my interview with Pedro Piniella. Two weeks from now I will be publishing my interview with Daniel Steinberg. And after that, the interview with Ellen Shapiro. I also have a number of recordings planned already with other people from the iOS developer community. Amongst them are Paul Hudson, Pawel muddy, Anastasia for Tova eudicot, a bit of Leo GDL. And I will do my first double interview with Nandhini, Chohan and plymstock. They're both from the Dutch ING Bank. There's also something interesting going on with the interview I'm planning with Judy kerrobert, of dirty carpets office working on his book about developing yourself from a junior developer to a senior developer. And I'm looking into people who want to join me on my discussion with Judy so that we have a sort of panel discussion on this topic. So if you are interested, this is a shout out. Please get in touch. And maybe we'll talk to each other on this special episode. Also, please follow me on Twitter. My handle there is app Force One. If you have feedback, put it on my Twitter as a DM or as an app mentioned, or even better put it in my SpeakPipe speakpipe.com/app Force One. Even before I started podcasting, something that I was always very adamant about has been my personal backups. For years, I've been using Backblaze for my backups. If you want an automatic backup of all your data, unlimited data, and unlimited file types, backup connected external USB drives, then definitely have a look at Backblaze. They've never failed me. And I've been able to upload all my backup data to their cloud solution. It's been wonderful, I highly recommend them. And if you want to have a look at them, please use my affiliate link in my show notes. Because if you sign up through that link, you will actually help support my podcast. Now let's look at news of last week. Let's begin with Apple Apple has announced two things they announced the app store small business program, and they announced subscription offer codes. Let's begin with the app store small business program. Basically what it means that if you are an existing or a new developer and you make $1 million in proceeds or less, you can apply for a special discount on your commission rates. So in what this basically means that instead of a 30% cut, Apple will take a 15% cut on the proceeds of your apps or in app purchase. Obviously, there are some details involved. So definitely read up on the details that Apple has posted on their website. And they also announced that they will provide further details as the date draws nearer. Because this is a program that starts at January 1 2021. I think it's an interesting move by Apple. It's also interesting that this lines up the commission rate 15% with the commission rate that you get on subscriptions that are longer than one year. And there are some different opinions on this move for Apple. But overall, I think this is a good thing. Because this allows small app developers to have a better chance of being successful. What Apple also announced is subscription offer codes, you can now create subscription offer codes to acquire and retain and Winback subscribers. This is the Apple blur. Basically what this means is that you can provide special discounts to to get new customers or to win back customers that have left your product. So I think this is a this is a good move by Apple in general, because this allows more avenues for developers to win and gain back customers. Ascot Patel has published an article on converting a PDF to an image in Swift. According to Ascot, converting a PDF file to an image is a common use case for any app that displays PDFs, you might want to display an image representation of a PDF file pages at different resolutions. Now Apple of course has a rich history of supporting PDF files that dates back to the old nextep days. And as such, iOS has a lot of support built in for PDF actually. And what Scott tries to do in his article is show you what's actually already available in iOS in PDF kit. And PDF kit is the Apple native framework for handling a PDF files. PDF gate is built on top of core graphics, so you should expect decent performance all in all Ascot provides a lot of sample code and some explanation on how and why you should actually do certain things in a certain way. And also make sure that you have your coordinate system correct. Now, obviously pspdfkit knows a thing or two about handling PDF files. And they also, obviously explain that PDF get by Apple is quite low level, and that you have a very nice solution available for you to actually use a higher level API, which is, of course, pspdfkit. Sudden is back with an interesting article with scaling custom fonts automatically with dynamic type. As we all know, all texts that you display in your app is rendered using fonts. And the feature that's not used by all apps out there is dynamic type. Dynamic type basically is a way for the text that's being displayed to be scaled according to the user's preference. Now, why is this important, of course, for accessibility, in his article, certain details ways that you can actually use a custom font and use the dynamic type feature of the iOS platform. That way, your app can be responsive to use preferences, especially if there's an accessibility need by the end user. And all in all, it's it's a good thing to support in your app. So definitely have a read on Sutton's article, it's a nice explanation on on how you can actually achieve nice results with dynamic type and a custom font [email protected] an interesting new library was announced swift Neo SSH. It's an open source project for the swift serve ecosystem. Swift neon, SSH is a programmatic implementation of SSH. It's a collection of API's that allow you to implement SSH speaking endpoints, so you can use it for the client side and the server side. They do note on the blog post that swift new SSH does not ship production ready SSH clients or servers, and that it only provides the building blocks for building a client or server. I think swift new SSH will enable some interesting integrations that are based on the SSH protocol as a network layer. Phillip Nemecek, wrote an article about anatomy of a collection view using compositional layout. Since I was 13, the new collection view compositional layout has been available. And it's a big change compared to the old way of creating complex collection view layouts. It's a more declarative approach to building complex layouts. And because iOS 13 is now becoming the minimum deployment or for a lot of projects and apps out there. I think it's good to start looking into these newer API's that were released in iOS 13. The advantage of using collection fuse with compositional layout is that it's way more declarative, and that it reduces the complexity of all the boilerplate code that you need to actually lay out a collection view. Of course, things still remain at somewhat a complex level. But at least this stuff is more manageable. Now. In this blog post, Philip explains what the different classes are that are involved with using a collective view with compositional layout. He provides a nice example and some details on the building blocks that are related to creating a layout in this fashion. It's a basic introductory article, but I think we should keep an eye out on Philips blog for more posts on this topic. I also wanted to share a quick tip by Dan Moren, from his six colors block, you can actually enable Touch ID for sudo operations on your terminal. So if you if you'd like to not enter your password every single time that you use sudo definitely have a look at this blog post. Because with this tip, you can actually use sudo and touch ID in combination, so that you don't have to type your password every single time. One last news item I want to mention is the Empower apps podcast. They just released their second part of the interview they had with Antoine finally, in the second part of the interview with Antoine they talked about how to upgrade older apps piece by piece, how you can support older OSs and bug tracking and logging. Definitely have listened to this podcast. And just as a little secrets, Leo and I have also planned to do an interview with each other sometime in the future. Among the morning, Donnie has also purposes so basically, Monday morning tweet. And there's already a lot of feedback rolling in on this on this tweet. But Trina will continue the Swift UI tutorial she's working on and she's writing some unit tests for a project. Donnie flood Ashish has just shipped his colors one app last week, and he's now trying to get people to download it and maybe even get some ratings and reviews on it. Lauren is having an iOS interview tomorrow and he's preparing himself and he is hoping that he gets good results from this interview. and Tomas Fattah released a new update for his in the app signal path. Cocoa heads and now has released the video of the talk by Axel roost on full stack swift with Arduino. This month, Axel has given a presentation at local Cocottes. And I'll meet up about using Swift full stack on an Arduino platform. It was an interesting talk. I must say AXA, was a bit nervous when he got started. But once he started getting into the techy details, he quickly settled down a bit, and he gave a very interesting talk about the topic. Have a look at the YouTube video linked from the show notes. This episode, I don't have a conference that I'm going to recommend because December is always a slow month for conferences. And people are more inclined to actually look at Thanksgiving, Christmas and all the holidays and vacations that happened in the December month. So when we get to January, we can look at more conferences again. I got an interesting question for coaching for free. This week, I got asked, How can I be a better team member? The question is based on the fact that this individual is getting feedback from his environment, that he should be a better team member, but not giving him any clear guidelines on what it would be. Best advice that I could give is to just listen. And I know this is hard. But listening involves a lot of keeping quiet without making it awkward, but usually remaining silent when you're talking to somebody and just shown interest by looking at the person that's talking will actually allow the other person to, to explain more and to tell more about the topic at hand. And if you just let them talk, quite often people just tell you what they need. You don't need to ask, you just need to talk to them, and let them do the talking for you. And most likely, the amount of time that you have to remain silent when talking to somebody is quite a lot longer than you might think. If somebody has given you an answer, before asking the next question, wait like two, three, maybe four seconds? And quite often people who just continue what we're actually talking about in the initial answer. And they will probably give you a lot more detailed information. Now at this point, you're not there yet, of course, you need to do something with the stuff that they tell you. So take notes, and then reply back to them what they actually told you just in your own words, tell them what you think they've told you, and let them say if that's correct or not. And then actually follow up on what I told you. I think if you do that, you will score much better on your next performance review on being a team player. If there's anything you need some help with or anything that you'd like me to provide some insights on, please put it in my SpeakPipe speakpipe.com/app Force One, and I will try my best to give you a good answer that will actually help you in your day to day life. And that's it for this week. If you have any feedback, and you like the show, please subscribe in your favorite podcast app of choice. All straight new Apple podcasts. I haven't received much reviews yet. But every single review counts. And if you can review my podcast, please do. Also consider signing up for my new newsletter. It's it's a once a month thing I'm going to send out at the moment. And I'd like to inform you on how my podcast is doing and what my plans are for the future. And also the thoughts and ideas on a book I want to write. So please sign up at app force one dotnet if there's any feedback you'd like to give, please message me on Twitter or leave a [email protected] slash Air Force One