This Week in Mobile: SiriKit, Swift 4, RxJava Animations

.The progress of software is relentless; you've just got your head around Swift 3, and already the plans are being put in place for Swift 4. On Android, we see how RxJava is fast becoming the essential library, with many examples of how it helps with data binding and animations.

iOS 

Certificates and provisioning, testing on older iOS versions. It can be difficult at times, and it prompted Pier Bover to write Why I Hate iOS As A Developer.

Sam Burnstone's excellent series on iOS 10 features is still going strong, with great tutorials on SiriKit and the new Speech Recognition framework.

Event Delivery on iOS has reached the end of its three-part series. If  you want to understand iOS better, this is a series that you can't miss. 

The proposal for work on Swift 4 was published on GitHub recently, and you'll be happy to know that source compatibility will be much more stringent this time around.

Here are some tips on Getting AutoLayout to Work in a UITableView.

Some projects that caught my attention: 

• Retry: Haven't you wished for `try` to sometimes try a little harder? Meet `retry

• ForceBlur: ForceBlur animation for messaging apps

• RxKeyboard: Reactive keyboard in iOS

• aperture.js: A library for screen recording
    

Android

RxJava Meets Android Data Binding shows how you can utilize everyone's favorite utility library to help you make your data binding more testable and readable.

Still on RxJava, Android Animations Powered by RxJava shows another great use of the library.

ConstraintLayout gets all the attention these days, but it could be that CoordinatorLayout is the Most Useful ViewGroup You're Not Using.

RxJava, Kotlin, ConstraintLayout and Buck are just some of the Latest Tech Trends for Android Developers.

Android Architecture Patterns: Model View Presenter is the second part of a series that builds on top of Google's Architecture Blueprints.

Projects: 

• DateTimeSeer: A painless way to pick future time

• FreshDownloadView: A download progressbar with cool animation

• BottomSheetPickers: Third-party time pickers for Android

• FingerprintAuthHelper: A small library that allows you to easily manage fingerprint authentication inside your Activity or Fragment on devices with a fingerprint scanner and Android M or higher

General 

Sometimes the simplest things can be the most important, such as Visual Dividers in Mobile UI Design. 

Need app inspiration? Here's a list of The 35 Most Innovative Apps of the Year.

Imagine if you missed a decade of JavaScript developments... scary. So Here's How it Feels to Learn JavaScript in 2016.

Bots are still trending; here's a great piece on How to Make a Context-Aware Bot: FourSquare's Big Bet on Marsbot.