Issue 104

News

Apple Developer System Status

What a disastrous week for the Apple Developer Center. Look on the bright side though, now we have a status page for developer services.

Doubts on Apple Developer Site Hack

There has obviously been plenty of speculation on the hack this week and I must admit something does smell a little off about the claims of Ibrahim Balic and I also wonder if the story is not quite as clean as it seems. Charles Arthur has been digging into it in more depth and it certainly looks like there is more to it than there might first appear to be.

Tools

Mantis

New Mac app which acts as an interface to the Apple bug reporter. Taking a different approach to Quick Radar this tool also allows you to check on the status of bugs, post updates, attach files and do virtually everything else that the web interface can do. It's still beta right now but it looks good so far.

HockeyCoach

Hockey just gets better and better. This new companion app for Hockey allows you to dig into your crash reports and once connected to your git repository and attached to the relevant tag or commit can show you the lines of source responsible for the issue. Remember when it used to be hard to find the source of crashes that were happening in the wild?

VVDocumenter

Wei Wang with a neat plugin for Xcode to generate JavaDoc style documentation for methods, properties and variables. If there were to be a new version of Xcode on the horizon which looked for this style of comments and used them to build automatic documentation from then I think this could end up being a really useful plugin.

Code

Stop writing data parsing code in your Apps

I really like this property mapper class from Krzysztof Zabłocki. No subclassing, no dependencies just a simple data structure to describe mappings between dictionaries and properties. The problem being solved by this is not enormous but for the amount of times this kind of code gets written this is a worthwhile little helper.

ParcelKit

The idea of using the Dropbox Datastore API which automatically persists Core Data objects makes me very nervous but that is exactly what Jonathan Younger has created here with ParcelKit. It's an interesting idea but you will want to do a lot of testing with this, especially around the automatic conflict resolution in the Datastore API which might be OK for a simple KV store but once you start putting complex objects into it? It's going to be a rocky ride. This is no criticism of the framework here, just that laying Datastore under the familiar feel of Core Data might give a level of trust which is misleading.

Masonry

Jonas Budelmann with a new DSL for Auto Layout which is much more readable than lines and lines of layout constraints being created manually.

macOS Development

Butter

Butter is a new UI framework for OS X which attempts to replace the standard AppKit controls without any trace of NSCell at all. It's early days so there are bound to be plenty of bugs and edge cases but it looks like an interesting project. I also noticed there is a UICollectionView implementation for OS X on another repository on the same account, wouldn't that be nice.

Design

Glyphish updated for iOS 7

Interview with Joseph Wain on the new Glyphish for iOS 7 which was released this week. It's a great update to the icon set and very timely too as I am sure plenty of people are looking for suitable icons right now so that they can be in apps in time for launch. It's interesting to hear his views on iOS 7 as well.

Business and Marketing

Honest In-App Purchases

David Smith again with some good commentary on the continuing trend of consumable in-app purchase based apps in the store. I think that the suggestion to display the cumulative amount of money spent on the app at purchase time would decimate that kind of app, but would that be a bad thing for the App Store as a whole? I don't think so.

Issue 104 July 26th 2013

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