Issue 105

2^nd August 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So the Dev Center seems to be back up now which is great news. I hope we never fight again. The downtime didn’t stop people blogging and creating amazing content though so on with the links! Dave.

Dave Verwer

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News

Rene Richie with an interesting take on the Logic Pro pricing discussions that have been happening recently. He certainly has a point that Mac App Store pricing has generally lowered the price of Mac software (not only from Apple themselves). There is still a significant psychological barrier with removing upgrade pricing as users love to feel they are getting some benefit from being loyal or buying in early.

The other significant problem with creating a new version instead of offering updates to the same app is that you lose your search ranking on the App Store when you create a new SKU. Allen Pike looks into the problem by investigating the search results for the term “Twitter” on the store and finds some pretty shocking results. Wallpapers HD, really?

Code

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this but I think I like it. It creates a new local scope for variables and is easier than the struct dance that we need to do to assign to things like frame and bounds properties. Interesting little technique.

It’s easy to forget about the open source Omni Frameworks but there are some really useful bits of code in there. In this post, Amy Worrall looks into implementing their document picker which mirrors the style of the Apple document pickers in iWork for iOS.

If there were a layer you were not allowed to create directly but you could steal from an instance of a UIKit class, would that code be App Store legal? From the look of the code I would say yes so this is an intriguing hack from César Pinto Castillo.

This isn’t directly related to iOS development but I couldn’t resist linking to it as it is a fantastic piece of work. Get structured data out of PSD files as well as being able to read and write them. It would be wonderful if this was ported to Objective-C.

Design

I am sure we all know how important typography is to working with the iOS and OS X platforms. If you are not quite there yet with it then this well crafted online book written by Matthew Butterick might be a good place to start. There is a ton of great information in here but I particularly found the section on font alternatives to the most popular fonts useful.

Business and Marketing

Ben Thompson with a really insightful article on Facebook on mobile. I hadn’t even considered the “full screen” advertising aspect of the Facebook feed but it’s so obvious when it’s pointed out.

Nathan Vella takes an in depth look at the sales figures from Sword & Sworcery across multiple platforms, not just iOS. It’s amazing to see the iOS sales stack up so high even against things like multiple Humble Bundle deals, especially in terms of revenue.

And finally...

These NSHipster quizzes are so great, take a break from your Friday and have a go with your coworkers.