Issue 65

26^th October 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Friday everyone. Sorry I am a few minutes late this week, the morning ran away with me.

Dave Verwer

News

This newly launched Newsstand magazine looks to be the business. Slickly designed with a mix of great content covering the technical, design and business side of iOS I am really looking forward to future issues.

This site by Josh Johnson contains a huge number of recorded presentations from CocoaHeads meetings all over the world. It has been around for a while now but I only just discovered it this week and it looks to be a great resource.

Tools

Interesting iOS usability testing library from Gabriel Handford. Capture the screen, interactions, video and audio while someone uses your app and then play it back later to see how they struggled (or didn’t). This is obviously a well established technique but this is the first implementation I have seen of it on iOS.

We released this little utility yesterday to help replace the status bar on your iOS App Store screenshots with a clean, perfect version. No carrier text, 9:41AM time, full battery, etc… I always tried to clean up the status bar before submitting our screenshots but I got a little tired of doing it manually in Photoshop every time so we produced a little tool to help us automate the task. Full disclosure: This tool was written by my company.

UIAutomation has always felt a little underdocumented to me and so I really liked this tutorial that I came across this week by Manbolo. There is also a great collection of UIAutomation resources at the end of the article if you want to learn more.

Michael Slater with a cute technique for simulating the real screen size of an iPad mini on a full size iPad. If you are not grabbing a real device for testing then might be your best bet to see what your app feels like at 80% scale.

Code

This newly released open source framework from GitHub could remove much of the boilerplate code which you may find yourself repeatedly adding to your model classes. Lots of good stuff in here for simplifying models.

GPUImage which I have linked to here before is a GPU accellerated framework for applying live visual effects to video and this article by Jake Gundersen takes a look at using it to produce a very cool effect of mixing two videos together.

Henny Swan takes a look at the new accessibility features introduced with iOS 6. I would also echo Henny’s recommendation to watch WWDC 2012 Session 210 if you are interested in learning more about these new features.

Design

Itching to get started with Photoshop as a developer? This article on designing a custom UISwitch in Photoshop takes you step by step through some of the basics of creating iOS style artwork in Photoshop.

Business and Marketing

It’s always interesting to get new iOS version adoption stats and this set from Chitika, an advertising network show very sharp growth early on but a slowdown recently. As always, take these figures with a fair dash of salt and make your decision based on your own user base.