Issue 90

19^th April 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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In this video tutorial, Ben Scheirman covers using Windows Azure Mobile Services as the backend for a full-featured chat app. The walk through starts by wiring up the SDK with CocoaPods, setting up Twitter authentication and enriching the data using JavaScript on the server. Later on, you’ll learn how to add the ability to post a message, poll for updates, and receive push notifications. This walk through also utilizes a pod called MessagesTableView controller to present an SMS like interface for the messages.

News

The debate on pricing rolls on into another week with Chris Adamson arguing that it’s already too late to save the App Store from being an unsustainable platform for developers to make money from directly. I like to think it’s not that far gone but he does make some good points here and while it’s always going to be tough to make a decent living directly from the App Stores, isn’t that true for many industries?

Tools

Florian Kugler on why he is considering dropping Interface Builder for his next project. I think the Auto Layout issues in IB are the most pressing here and while I am still a big proponent of IB and use it for all of our projects I also turn off Auto Layout for them all as well. Storyboards I am much happier with and while Florian points out some of the issues here for me they are not enough to consider not using IB. Interesting discussion though.

Tom Harrington with a curious little project to reconstruct xcdatamodel and xcdatamodeld files from compiled Core Data models. I am not sure I see much of a practical use for this but browsing the source should give you an insight into the some of the depths of Core Data as well as some potentially useful categories.

Code

Felix Krause with a beautiful implementation of TweetBot style slideover alerts which might help you avoid the nasty modal UI trap that UIAlertView tries to tempt you into.

Really interesting article by Jason Harwig on capturing hand written signatures on iOS by converting hand drawn lines into quadratic beziers with stroke widths based on the velocity of the gesture. The results look really good.

Nicholas Bruning with an implementation of fuzzy string matching/scoring based on a JavaScript library of the same name by Joshaven Potter.

Design

A repository of over 15 iOS template files with various bits of iOS UI, all built for Sketch compiled by Rodolfo Novak. An extremely useful resource if you are using Sketch for mockups, which I am.

Facebook Home is obviously it is only available on Android but something interesting came out in the media coverage of the recent launch, prototypes of Home were created in Quartz Composer. David O Brien has put together a great set of video tutorials showing how to recreate the prototypes. Seems like everything has gone so quiet with Quartz composer over the last few years and I think many people had forgotten it, I wonder if this will bring it back into the limelight.

And finally...

A lecture given in 1991, worth a watch if you have 15 minutes.