Issue 101

5^th July 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

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News

This is a wonderful new blog from the organisers of App Camp for Girls. Described as tales to inspire a new generation of developers, it’s a quickly growing list of interviews with iOS and Mac developers who share how they got started and advice they have for people who want to get started in the industry. It may be aimed at the participants of the camp, but there are some interesting stories here for everyone.

By all accounts last weekend’s push to create more open source Objective-C code was a great success with over 400 people contributing something. This post highlights some of Mattt Thompson and Aaron Sarazan’s favourite projects from the day along with a top 5 projects by number of stars. Great stuff.

Tools

I have linked to this before but Michael Flarup has updated the site for the new iOS 7 version of the template while keeping the iOS 6 version around and also adding an Android version. Includes a quick video to explain the actions and how to get started with the template. Worth linking to again.

Code

Joel Kraut with a lovely little library for automatically having views squash and stretch themselves as they move to add a little playfulness to your apps. It’s an especially nice touch that the direction of motion and velocity are automatically detected so there is almost no coding overhead from adding this.

Damien DeVille with probably the worst idea I have ever linked to on iOS Dev Weekly, he says “I cannot stress enough on the fact that you should probably never even think of using this”, I say remove the word “probably” from that sentence. Fun article though.

Design

What a great post from Teehan+Lax on rethinking the calendar metaphor on a mobile device. The best thing about this however is that the whole project has been open sourced on Github. Even if you are not concerned about the specifics of the calendar implementation, this is a non-trivial example of UICollectionView and Reactive Cocoa.

How does the iOS 7 scale down (or up)? Chris Harris takes a look with a quick mock up of how an iOS 7 style nano might look.

Business and Marketing

This is pretty shocking story from Jon Lipsky on how he found old versions of his apps being sold by other “developers” on the App Store. I was aware that the FairPlay DRM had been compromised which explains how they get the apps ready to re-sign and submit but how are these getting through review?

Matt Henderson with a great point about auto updates to apps in iOS 7. Did we just lose a valuable avenue of communication with our users?

And finally...

I love just about everything in the design of this screen from Ridiculous Fishing, not just the dynamic status bar. Little Big Details is a great blog too if you aren’t already subscribed.