Issue 102

12^th July 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Dropbox entered the hosted “back end as a service” arena this week. Their datastore API is a simple key/value store rather than anything more ambitious like iCloud Core Data sync is attempting and Tom Harrington has written up a great post on the details. I have been saying for a while now that that competition with this kind of hosted services would be fierce and with Parse being snapped up by Facebook recently, now Dropbox jumping in and the difficulties experienced by developers with iCloud that seems to be coming true.

Drew Crawford with a well researched and comprehensive look at the state of Javascript performance on mobile platforms and argues that we are still a long way off it being fast enough to do significant work with. There is a wealth of information in this article, I especially liked the section on garbage collection and memory performance between desktop and mobile but the whole thing is a great read.

Tools

Delisa Mason has put together a new plugin for Xcode 5 to allow configuration, installation and updating of CocoaPods without ever having to go near the command line. It also has the option to install documentation for the pod directly into the doc browser. Looks great if you are using CocoaPods.

Code

I did not know that the NSURLConnection APIs were designed during the development of Safari but it makes perfect sense when you look at them, especially the way that “error” HTTP status codes are handled. Ole Begemann digs into the details and ends with some great advice on API design.

It should be no surprise that edge cases are going to catch you out occasionally but I liked this story by Jay Graves which acts as a good reminder to explore parental controls when testing your app. On a related note, I was thoroughly confused by an iPad I came across a while ago that had no Safari app and it took me a good while to figure out what was going on there.

Mariano Abdala with a nice piece of advice on cleaning up after your push notifications. Don’t let those badges hang around after they are needed.

macOS Development

Rick Fillion on the subject of accepting MAS receipts for non-MAS builds of a product. Sounds like a great idea for those situations where you need to quickly get a new version into a customer’s hands while the Mac App Store review process is ongoing and the approach looks to have very few downsides.

Design

This tumblr is collecting a whole load of iOS 7 redesign mockups for popular apps. Not all of these are created by the original developers but I liked it as a way to see how the iOS 7 style of design might be tweaked and extended in 3rd party apps as we move prepare for the release.

Business and Marketing

Dave Addey has been capturing data on which apps are featured by Apple across all of the worldwide store fronts for the last few months and has put it together into an excellent, interactive article which allows you to inspect the data alongside his choice of interesting data points. Great work.

I hadn’t considered localising for different strains of English before for anything except spelling differences but Neil Inglis posed a question on Twitter this week which you might want to pay atttention if you are using using any words in your app title, description or even keywords that might have different meanings in the various strains of English around the world.

And finally...

… and iOS 11 is also going to be white on white.