Some thoughts on this weeks Apple Developer conference – WWDC 2020
Today sees the conclusion of the annual Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (aka WWDC 2020), and I just wanted to offer a few thoughts and highlights as to what’s been announced, what we can expect, and what it means to me and my clients.
First off it was a highly polished and professional keynote, as you would expect from Apple, but more so considering much of the events charm is in the atmosphere of a full auditorium of developers, something not possible this year for obvious reasons.
Apple Mac and the move to ARM
The big announcement, and worst kept secret, was that going forward new Apple Mac products (iMac, MacBook, Mac Pro etc) will be running Apple Silicone (ARM based processors – like the iPhone and iPad), a move away from the current Intel (x86 – like most Windows PC’s and Laptops use) chips. At a technical level this is massive for developers, but Apple have made as easy a pathway as possible, where it does become interesting though as this means there will be the ability for iPhone apps to run, out of the box on new Apple hardware. This means there will be a lot more apps available for the Mac instantly, but also a dilemma for developers and clients considering a Mac presence, to you optimise the Mac app as you have always done before, or make do with your iPhone app working on the Mac even if the experience is not idea?
Mac OS Big Sur as it’s named got a visual overall too, looking very similar to the iPad it has to be said – time will tell on that one I think
iPhone and iPad
Even though technically iOS and iPad OS are separate things now, I’ll tag them together under the iOS 14 banner. I’m already running this in Beta, and so far it looks very pretty, stable, and a decent step forward, highlights include;
– Widgets on the home screens
– Upgraded Messages app (Pinned conversations, mentions etc)
– Offline translation
– App clips – Mini apps you don’t have to install / login and just use once, eg car parking apps
– Improved privacy notifications in Safari
– Scribbles – Handwriting recognition from the Apple Pencil to enter small amounts of text / search etc
Apple Watch
No real headline grabbers here, Watch OS 7 is just everything a little bigger and better than before, new workouts, watch faces, emoji (of course!), sleep tracking, and make sure you wash your hands properly!
Overall there’s a lot to work through, for many it’s, just an iterative year, for developers a little more exciting, but if you’d like to know more about Apple, WWDC 2020, or you are considering getting an App developed for any of the Apple platforms then I’d love to hear from you.
About me
Andy Flisher is a Mobile App Developer based in the North East of England with over 20 years software development experience. He is available for hire and specialises in cross platform mobile app development, web applications, desktop software, bespoke cloud architecture solutions and providing outsourced project management services.
How to Enable shake detection in Xamarin Forms
This needs to be added to every page (in the .cs code behind) for every page you want to enable shake detection in Xamarin Forms, if you are using a MasterDetaail navigation hierarchy then you can get away with adding this the MainPage.xaml.cs to cover all the navigated to pages too.
Amend to suit but the example below would navigate to a fictional ‘Support’ Page when the device is shaken, requires the Xamarin Essentials package;
Andy Flisher, the founder of Xyroh, is a mobile app developer, specialising in cross platform mobile apps, iphone apps, android apps, as well as web applications and desktop software for business clients across the North East – feel free to contact him to engage his services
How to fix the ‘This app is no longer shared with you’ error
There seems to be a surge of people reporting the ‘This app is no longer shared with you’ message when they open apps on iOS devices. Not sure why, our suspicion is that it’s a server side bug in and around family sharing, but that’s not confirmed.
Deleting the app and reinstalling will work, but you will potentially lose any data that’s stored locally, so our recommendation is to ‘offloads the app. This was introduced as a means to save space on your device by temporarily removing apps that you rarely use, but not losing any data or settings.
So whilst it’s a pain you can offload the app and then immediately restore it to fix this bug, full instructions are over at https://www.idownloadblog…
If this helped you fix the ‘This app is no longer shared with you’ error on your iPhone then would appreciate the share, if you have any other updates or solutions then please hit up the comments and we’ll update the article.
Oops – How to fix when you’ve upgraded Visual Studio for Mac / Xamarin iOS and now being forced to upgrade Xcode and to Catalina ????
What went wrong?
So, here’s the scenario, fire up Visual Studio for the Mac, not enough caffeine in the system, an ‘updates’ box pop up, a Xamarin iOS update amongst many, you click ok, then instant regret ????. Why you may ask, an update is good? No? Well not here. Like many developers I have a reluctance to go to Mac OS Catalina (a lot of changes, and too many issues) and am quite happy in the stable, stable land of Mojave. So what have I done?
In essence I’ve upgraded the version of Xamarin iOS from somewhere in the 12.x range to 13.16. I knew the second I’d upgraded it had gone wrong, but opening a Xamarin iOS / Forms project instantly told me. My selected version of Xamarin iOS required an Xcode upgrade to 11.x. Off to the App Store I go, just to confirm, and of course;
Mojave of course is 10.14, Catalina 10.15, so I have to upgrade right, and lose a day of productivity (or more) with it? Wrong.
The fix
So, the solution, first off come out of Visual Studio for Mac, and then drop to Terminal app. Execute these commands line by line (entering your admin password when required);
rm -rf ~/Library/MonoTouch sudo rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/Xamarin.iOS.framework sudo rm -rf /Developer/MonoTouch sudo pkgutil --forget com.xamarin.monotouch.pkg sudo pkgutil --forget com.xamarin.xamarin-ios-build-host.pkg sudo pkgutil --forget com.xamarin.xamarin.ios.pkg
In the meantime I had downloaded the latest 12.16 release of Xamarin iOS. For me this is https://dl.xamarin.com/Mo… however your requirements may vary. Should be as simple as tweaking the download url to suit, you can find 12.x version numbers over here on the Xamarin iOS 12 release notes page.
Once downloaded simply double click and install the package. Then fire up Visual Studio for Mac and fingers crossed, all worked fine for me.
About me
Andy Flisher is a Mobile App Developer based in the North East of England with over 20 years software development experience. He is available for hire and specialises in cross platform mobile app development, web applications, desktop software, bespoke cloud architecture solutions and providing outsourced project management services.
Updating Apps that Use Web Views – Are you affected?
Updating Apps that Use Web Views – News – Apple Developer:
If your app still embeds web content using the deprecated UIWebView API, we strongly encourage you to update to WKWebView as soon as possible for improved security and reliability. WKWebView ensures that compromised web content doesn’t affect the rest of an app by limiting web processing to the app’s web view. And it’s supported in iOS and macOS, and by Mac Catalyst.
The App Store will no longer accept new apps using UIWebView as of April 2020 and app updates using UIWebView as of December 2020.
In layman terms if your app loads content from the web, eg a webpage or a web application then this could affect you. For Xyroh clients, especially those based on Xamarin forms this should’t be a problem as they already use WkWebView.
Worst affected will be those who have stale apps, or aren’t being regularly supported by the original developers – in those cases please get in touch, we can do an analysis of the original source code, let you know if affected, cost to fix and support going forward, and the side effects of doing nothing – basically let you make an informed decision.
Andy Flisher is a Software Developer based in the North East of England with over 20 years software development experience. He is available for hire and specialises in cross platform mobile app development, web applications, desktop software, bespoke cloud architecture solutions and providing outsourced project management services.