There are a few new goodies for iOS developers shipping during the holiday season. Over the weekend, app analytics firm AppFigures released a cool new feature called ‘Sharable Review Cards’. Essentially, developers can curate their App Store reviews for some of their best feedback and quickly share a link to that comment for others to admire.
The cards take on the theme from the app icon, so each review card appearance matches the app it is about. In the example above, my app Bingo Machine uses a dark blue background tint, so the AppFigures Card uses the same blue for the review title. It’s a pretty cool feature for devs who want to positively promote their app on social media with actual customer testimonials.
There are also some new releases from Facebook’s Parse, the third-party cloud sync framework that Apple later aped with its own CloudKit service, with complete support for the newest Apple platforms, namely watchOS and tvOS.
Today, Parse has officially released SDKs suitable for Apple Watch and Apple TV with relevant forks for watchOS and tvOS, respectively. Although Parse could run tvOS and watchOS apps previously (thanks to the underlying shared Foundation core that underpins all of Apple’s platforms), there are some optimizations that really make the SDK easy to use and intuitive for each platform.
For example, with the Parse tvOS release, the company has removed any references to saving state to disk as Apple TV apps are not allowed to use persistent local storage for app data at all. In particular, the Parse watch SDK now fully supports watchOS 2 so you can write Parse-powered apps that run natively on the device itself for maximum performance.
Alongside tvOS and watchOS integration, the 1.11.0 release also adds the ability to schedule push notifications for a particular time which benefits apps like calendars and event trackers. You can download the new release from the Parse GitHub repository. Check the Parse blog for more details on the new version.
