NSHipster Quiz #7

On June 9th, we organized the third annual WWDC edition of the NSHipster Pub Quiz, with topics ranging from pop cultural trivia to technical pedantry. A huge thanks to Realm, who opened their offices and hosted with aplomb the scores of developers who turned out for the quiz.

With dozens of teams competing for the prizes on offer, competition was fierce. After the final tally, Team “U+1F4A9” (aka “💩 PILE OF POO”) took the top prize with a score of 35 points. Congratulations to Benjamin Encz, Dave Verwer, Emilio Peláez, Jeffrey Bergier, Michael Helmbrecht, and Warren Moore on the win!

As always, you can play along at home or at work with your colleagues. Here are the rules:

  • Four rounds of ten questions each
  • Record your answers on a separate sheet of paper
  • Each correct answer to a question gets you 1 point (unless otherwise specified)
  • Play with up to five friends for maximum enjoyment
  • Don’t be lame and look things up on the Internet or in Xcode

Round 1: General Knowledge

  1. What 1989 movie introduces its protagonist free climbing El Capitan, to disastrous effect?
  2. El Capitan looks down on a river that winds through Yosemite. What is the river’s name?
  3. In the WWDC keynote, Tim Cook showed off a list of demands some Cleveland Indians players were using to ransom their teammate’s 100th home run ball. What item did Apple carefully remove from the list?
  4. With WebKit already using WK, WatchKit had to find a different class prefix. What is the unusual prefix used for the most of the WatchKit framework?
  5. The name “Swift” can be written using a ligature for its final two letters. What are the five Unicode-standard ligatures beginning with the letter “f”?
  6. The typeface used for Apple Watch (and the new versions of iOS and OS X) is “San Francisco,” but it isn’t the first custom font Apple has used by that name. What were the letters of the original “San Francisco” meant to resemble? For a bonus point, name the original font’s designer.
  7. What is reportedly the lock screen image on Jony Ive’s iPhone?
  8. Apple made a splash when they announced that ResearchKit would be open source and hosted on GitHub. What was the first pull request accepted for ResearchKit?
  9. ResearchKit also uses an unexpected class prefix. What is the prefix and what does it stand for?
  10. Scott Forstall is back in the news, producing a Broadway musical that just won five Tonys. What is the name of the musical? For a bonus point, upon what author’s memoir is the musical based?

Round 2: Name That Framework

How well do you know Cocoa? For each question in this round, you’ll be given three classes with their identifying prefix removed. Name the framework which contains all three.

  1. MultiPoint, Placemark, Polyline
  2. Locale, NotificationCenter, NumberFormatter
  3. Correlation, Statistics, Unit
  4. Navigation, Preferences, UserScript
  5. Switch, Timer, Map
  6. URL, URLCache, URLCredential
  7. Activity, Lexicon, DictationPhrase
  8. ContentItem, MoviePlayerController, RemoteCommand
  9. PaymentToken, PaymentMethod, ShippingMethod
  10. Beacon, Floor, Visit

Round 3: Picture Round

  1. Who is shown here sporting this unannounced gold link bracelet Apple Watch shortly before launch? Picture 1

  2. What TV show featured these watches? For a bonus point, what was the related catchphrase? Picture 2

  3. Hailing from the same era, what development tool is this? Picture 3

  4. What Apple Design Award-winning app is this? Picture 4

  5. What Apple Design Award-winning app is this? Picture 5

  6. What app is this? Picture 6

  7. What app is this? Picture 7

  8. Who is this? Picture 8

  9. Who is this? Picture 9

  10. What are the Unicode names for these Emoji? Picture 10

Round 4: Anagrammable

NSAnagram has been ported to Swift as Anagrammable, still a vexing test of knowledge and concentration. Each question is an anagram, whose letters can be rearranged to form the name of a type or protocol in the Swift standard library. Good luck!

For timing, listen to these three songs play back to back:




  1. Be Loud!
  2. Forget No Ear
  3. Too Plain
  4. Oboe Penalty
  5. Scalable Lube Item
  6. Poets Win At Poetry
  7. Ol’ Potty Licence
  8. Unprofitable Tea Menus
  9. Ram Placebo
  10. Tin?

Answers

Round 1: General Knowledge

  1. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
  2. Merced River
  3. 50 gallon drum of lube
  4. WKInterface
  5. ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl
  6. A ransom note, by Susan Kare
  7. A Playmobile figure of himself
  8. A typo in the README.md
  9. ORK: Open Research Kit
  10. Fun Home, based on the memoir by Alison Bechdel

Round 2: Name That Framework

  1. MapKit
  2. Foundation or CoreFoundation (2 points for both)
  3. HealthKit
  4. WebKit
  5. WatchKit
  6. Foundation
  7. UIKit
  8. MediaPlayer
  9. PassKit
  10. CoreLocation

Round 3: Picture Round

  1. Beyonce
  2. Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, “Synchronize Swatches”
  3. ResEdit
  4. Metamorphabet
  5. Workflow
  6. Meerkat
  7. GIFs
  8. Chris Lattner
  9. Christian Laettner
  10. Aubergine, Dancer, Clinking Beer Mugs

Round 4: Anagrammable

  1. Double! (2 points if marked as an implicitly unwrapped optional)
  2. GeneratorOf
  3. Optional
  4. BooleanType
  5. MutableSliceable
  6. RawOptionSetType
  7. CollectionType
  8. UnsafeMutablePointer
  9. Comparable
  10. Int? (2 points if marked as an Optional)

Well, how did you do this time? Tweet out your score to see how you stack up to your peers!

NSMutableHipster

Questions? Corrections? Issues and pull requests are always welcome.

Written by Nate Cook
Nate Cook

Nate Cook (@nnnnnnnn) is an independent web and application developer who writes frequently about topics in Swift, and the creator of SwiftDoc.org.

Next Article

WWDC 2015 may not have packed quite as many fireworks as its predecessor, but neither was it short on the new and shiny. For this week’s issue, we’ll take a look at some of the changes that iOS 9 brings to the APIs we already know and love.