Issue 100

28^th June 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Issue 100? Cool. I bet no one who knows me thought I would stick with it this long…

Dave Verwer

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Today is my oldest son’s 5th birthday. And like the other sons and daughters of Briefs developers, he is supported by your continued interest and support in Briefs. So each time you tell a friend about how Briefs will help them redesign their app for iOS 7, you’re wishing a happy birthday. And who doesn’t like birthdays? Happy Birthday Aaron, your mother and I are so proud of you.

News

I’m not sure I am too worried about the top languages list on Github but I can certainly get behind the initiative to release more open source code. Anyone fancy writing and releasing some open source Objective-C tomorrow?

Of course there has been much digging through API diffs, documentation, sample code and WWDC videos for the new iOS 7 and Mavericks APIs but around this time of year it’s always worth having a look at what is changing in Safari. WebKit is our only rendering engine on iOS and Maximiliano Firtman gives us the low down on some of the changes. Don’t forget to click through to the Apple Dev Forums for the bits of the post covered by the NDA.

Tools

While the videos were published in record time this year finding the sample code on the WWDC web site is no easy task (I may be dumb but I actually couldn’t find it at all on the official site). Luckily Johannes Fahrenkrug has managed to find it and put together a useful tool to download it all and store it in well named folders relating to the session name. Great work.

Joseph Lord reminds us all that many of the open source licenses that we use still require attribution and it’s something which is often overlooked. On this subject, one of my favourite features of CocoaPods is that it can gather up license files and compile them into both a plain text license attribution and also a plist file which is suitable for inserting into a settings bundle.

Great list of links for iOS development from Dave Mark, he also has a link to a set of essential developer tools about half way through the initial intoduction which is also worth a click. There are a bunch of extra suggestions in the comments as well including some very kind people suggesting this email should be included which I really appreciate.

Code

There are plenty of CSS like styling frameworks knocking around but I quite like the hands off approach that this tiny library from Brent Simmons takes. Sure, it is primarily going to be used to apply styling but as it is simpler than that it could also be used to enable/disable features during development. Plus, it’s drop dead simple and I am always a fan of that.

I haven’t had more than a cursory glance at Go since it was released but I always enjoy learning approaches from other languages, maybe I should take a better look at it. It’s always worth digging into a language which takes a different approach to what you are familiar with, you almost always come out of the experience a better developer.

Design

A lovely collection of mockups on how the iOS 7 music player might have looked if the designers had taken the same approach as desktop iTunes with regards to colour schemes derived from album art. If anything, I think this design works better on iOS 7 than on the desktop as I never particularly liked the circular transparency around the edges of the artwork.

I think the best way to sum up Capptivate is as Pttrns or Mobile Patterns but for animations rather than static images. There is some great work highlighted here.

Business and Marketing

Nice round up of all sorts of current iOS marketing related posts by Alex Curylo. You will surely be familiar with some of these posts already but I bet there is plenty in this post that you haven’t read.

And finally...

Ding dong! The witch is dead. Seriously though, this is an admirable and responsible decision by the maintainers of Three20.