Apple made a radical decision with iOS 9, disabling all unsecured HTTP traffic from iOS apps, as a part of App Transport Security.

The WWDC keynote today was great, except for the part where it just wouldn’t end. Tons of new stuff on the development front including Swift 2, iOS 9, CloudKit etc.

Here are some notes I gathered while browsing release notes, API diffs, feature pages and so on.

Retain cycles. We’ve all likely been bitten by it at least once. Especially with the increasing role blocks/closures play in modern day iOS development. As you probably already know, referencing any object from inside a block captures a strong reference to it, and if that object copies/retains the block, it results in a retain cycle, that could cause a memory leak unless the block is manually nil’ed out.

I’m sure you’ve often wanted to inspect the return value of a method in Xcode’s debugger with breakpoints. But because you can’t put a breakpoint after the last line of a method, it becomes slightly tricky to figure out the return value. Thankfully, there’s an easy trick.

Michael Villar’s excellent Motion Experiments post had a great image loading animation. RJImageLoader is a recreation of that animation in Objective-C for iOS.

If you want to know how it was implemented, read this tutorial on raywenderlich.com.

Fork/Clone/Pod/Contribute!

Twitter recently updated its iOS app with a really cool startup animation that transitions from the Default.png to the timeline view. The animation uses the Twitter bird as a window into the timeline view, and then zooms it in. Here’s a demo:

Earlier this week Ole Begemann wrote a really great tutorial on how UIScrollViews work, and to explain it effectively, he even created a really simple scroll view, written from scratch.

The setup was quite simple: Use a UIPanGestureRecognizer, and change the bounds’ origin in response to translation of the pan gesture.

Extending Ole’s custom scroll view to incorporate UIScrollView’s inertial scrolling seemed like a natural extension, and with Facebook’s recent release of Pop, I thought it writing a decelerating custom scroll view would be an interesting weekend project.

Facebook today open sourced its highly-anticipated animation framework called Pop that powers the animations in the Paper for iOS app.

Pop’s methods for defining animations resemble Apple’s Core Animation API, so it should be quite easy to pick up if you’ve worked with CoreAnimation before. Even if you haven’t, writing a basic animation with Pop is quite easy.

There are a lot of Xcode plugins to augment the IDE with additional features, conveniences etc., but it is a pain to discover and install such plugins. Alcatraz is a really great package manager that makes it a breeze to install Xcode plugins. Here’s how it looks:

In Alcatraz, you’ll find plugins, color schemes and templates for code fragments. You can install it by visiting alcatraz.io.

Here are some of the best Xcode plugins available in Alcatraz to boost your productivity: