Issue 103

19^th July 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

This week saw a major update to the Google Maps iOS SDK with access to street view, floor plans and much more attractive map tiles. I think that the split between Google and Apple maps which happened with iOS 6 has turned out to be quite positive for both developers and consumers as both Google and Apple are now free to enhance their map SDKs and apps without relying on each other.

I’m not sure I would go quite as far as Dermot Daly to say insta-delete as I am still using 2 apps which haven’t been upgraded for the 4 inch display but unless your app is both essential and unreplaceable and you don’t mind annoying your users then you are going to struggle to survive on iOS 7. If you aren’t looking at how your apps “fit” with the new platform design as well as just testing for pure compatibility then you need to start looking, now.

Tools

Soulver is one of my favourite tools of any kind on my Mac and I must have used it almost every day since buying it a few years ago. I use it for geometry and dimension calculations all the time but I never thought to do as Marc Edwards has done and define a whole load of constants, all normalised into points rather than pixels and downloadable to directly import for good measure. Thanks Marc.

Super simple tool from Marco Arment to annotate and send screenshots containing bugs. I really like this as it is about the simplest possible way to solve this problem. Select a screenshot (filtered to only screenshots from your camera roll). Add an arrow with one drag. Share. Done.

Code

Tomer Shiri with a macro implementation of generics in Objective-C. While Objective-C is being improved at a faster pace than ever before I would really like to see generics added natively some day, it feels like a bit of a gap at the moment.

Mike Abdullah reveals some of the intricacies and inconsistencies of the various methods of extracting a path from a URL using Foundation/Core Foundation. Bump yourself up on the list, Mike.

Design

Rob Rhyne with a thoughtful article on iOS 7 design being about materials rather than pixels. I couldn’t agree more. I have been working with iOS 7 closely for the last few weeks and this really resonated with me after digging into it for a while. I also love the new design, not because of (or in spite of) the font, icons and any other number of superficial things, but because of how it moves, interacts and plays.

Every time you find yourself writing UIAlertView alloc, stop and think. I have an app which I (mostly)love, I use it several times a week and and the end of one of its workflows it sends an email out using the standard mail view controller. After sending the mail, it informs me with a modal alert “Email is queued for sending by the Mail app”. I know, I just hit send. Every time.

Business and Marketing

Technically this is related to the Mac App Store but I think the message is clear here, don’t bet on upgrade pricing on the App Store. The release of Logic Pro X would have been a great time to introduce it, with the existing app being moved over to the MAS (at a reduced price, if I remember rightly) there was a set of users that would have made a great, relatively low profile test case for upgrade pricing. David Smith goes into more detail.

And finally...

Commentary by Graham Lee.