With the release of iOS 10 and the need to update iOS apps to suit, I have decided it is time to retire some of my lesser-performing apps as it is not worth the effort required to maintain them. At the moment, the following iOS apps are no longer available: A Knight’s Move Dice Pass Pic-a-POD Quick Score - Tennis For the first three listed there, the Mac versions are still available:

Man Reader has been updated to version 1.6 with the permissions needed for finding all available man pages and a fix for search terms being over-written after a background update. Man Reader 1.6 is now available through the Mac App Store. Change Log: # Permissions fix when searching for available man pages. Fixed error with new search term being over-written. Sand-boxed version now works just as well as the non-sand-boxed so please switch back to this version.

I recently got an email from someone who had purchased Dice Pass for Mac from the Mac App Store but had been unable to get it to run. This person was using OS X 10.9.3. I checked the App Store specifications and it showed that 10.9 was the minimum system requirement, so it should have worked. But going back to my Xcode project, I found that it was set to a minimum of OS X 10.

Sets are the forgotten collection type in many languages, including Swift. I think most developers use Arrays without really considering the advantages of using a Set but they have some amazingly useful features that should make them a part of any progammer’s toolkit. If you want to follow along with a playground, you can download it here. What is a Set? # A Set is an un-ordered collection of unique items.

One of the problems with using 19th Hole on the Apple Watch is making the app show every time you raise your wrist. My solution to this was to go into Settings (either on my iPhone through the Watch app, or directly on the watch) and change it to “Resume Last Activity” on wrist raise. This worked fine but as I usually prefer the watch face to show on wrist raise, I had to keep setting and re-setting this which was a pain.

As the Apple Watch hits its first birthday, there seems to be in increasing number of bloggers complaining about it. One (which I refuse to link to) titled “My Year of Hell With the Apple Watch”. I think the article has since been re-published with a slightly less inflammatory title, but really! Did somebody rivet the watch to his wrist? If it was so awful, why not just stop using it?

I ran into an unusual problem when testing my latest app: “What Is My Speed?”. It is now available from the iTunes App Store, but getting there was a struggle.

Over the past few months, we have done two long road trips: one approximately 4,000 km and the other about 1,800 km. These gave us the chance to try out various apps for navigation and travel information. We live in Queensland, Australia and some of these comments may be country-specific. Navigation # The basic navigation came down to three apps: Apple Maps Google Maps Metroview (Australia and New Zealand only) Each has their strengths and weaknesses:

One of the big debates among Swift developers is when to use structs and when to use classes. Classes are the building blocks of object-oriented programming but structs as provided by Swift are newly powerful. Structs have been around in C-based languages for a long time, but Swift has made them more powerful and given them more features so that they are almost indistinguishable from classes. So what are the differences and which one should you use?