Issue 106

9^th August 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

I have no idea how this one snuck past me but this tweet by Mark Errett this week tipped me off that Apple have recently added additional pricing tiers on the lower end of the pricing matrix in iTunes connect. What is interesting is that for the first time pricing is effectively different amongst countries here as “Alternate Tier 1” is $0.99 in the US (same as regular tier 1) but also £0.99 in the UK (which is higher than the tier 1 UK price).

Craig Hockenberry recently put out a quick survey for iOS developers to see who was planning to update their apps for iOS 7. The results were predictably high at 95% for that first question but the second question asked who was planning to go iOS 7 only for their next update and those figures might surprise you. That said, it’s exactly what I am doing with one of our app updates that is currently in progress so maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Tools

Nick Arnott with a bit of a warning about using a 3rd party server to build and distribute your apps. Apart from the specific issue Nick talks about, also remember that by definition all of these services will need access to your source code, certificates and private keys to be able to do what they need to do and so you should approach with at least a little caution when considering one.

I remember the announcement of delta app updates when iOS 6 was released but hadn’t heard anything else about it until this document passed by in my Twitter feed this week and it reminded me to take a look at the details. If you have a large app with data which doesn’t change much then you may be able to shuffle things around a little to take better advantage of this feature.

Nils Hayat on the significant changes to the XIB file format in XcodeNOTSODACTED. Looks like XIB files are now using the storyboard XML format, great news.

Code

The third issue of objc.io arrived this week and Chris Eidhof, Daniel Eggert and Florian Kugler are joined by Joe Conway and Ole Begemann to discuss everything view related. The quality of articles in objc.io is consistently excellent and this issue is no exception. Read it all, then subscribe so I don’t have to link to it every month.

I am not a game developer so I hadn’t really given this topic much thought but I really enjoyed Steffen Itterheim’s analysis of why a physics engine is a bad choice for a 2D platform game. All of the reasons make sense, I guess I just hadn’t thought about it from this perspective before and it’s always good to look at things with a different perspective every once in a while.

Interesting library from Mattt Thompson for real time, streaming, event based JSON updates from a web server. Includes both a server side implementation based on Rack and a preview/RC of AFNetworking 2.0 which is worth a look even if you don’t need the functionality of Rocket as it has had some major revisions which are not entirely related to this project.

Business and Marketing

Nir Eyal with a look at the psychology of “want to” and “have to”, specifically comparing two fitness apps for iOS, Fitocracy and MyFitnessPal. There is plenty of food for thought in this one which might even make you revisit your app design.

I am a little disappointed that iOS 7 hasn’t included a more significant redesign to the App Store app. Admittedly, it’s all still in beta at the moment but I am not expecting any major changes now. This article sees Phillip Johns taking a look at the current state of play and not particularly liking what he sees.

And finally...

Readable regular expressions? When do we get an Objective-C port?