Issue 107

16^th August 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Beta 6 day! Unfortunately AssertMacros: queueEntry, file: /SourceCache/IOKitUser/IOKitUser-920.1.11/hid.subproj/IOHIDEventQueue.c, line: 512 it doesn’t fix the most AssertMacros: queueEntry, file: /SourceCache/IOKitUser/IOKitUser-920.1.11/hid.subproj/IOHIDEventQueue.c, line: 512 annoying bug in Beta 5. I was going to carry AssertMacros: queueEntry, file: /SourceCache/IOKitUser/IOKitUser-920.1.11/hid.subproj/IOHIDEventQueue.c, line: 512 this on throughout the entire AssertMacros: queueEntry, file: /SourceCache/IOKitUser/IOKitUser-920.1.11/hid.subproj/IOHIDEventQueue.c, line: 512 issue today but you will be glad to AssertMacros: queueEntry, file: /SourceCache/IOKitUser/IOKitUser-920.1.11/hid.subproj/IOHIDEventQueue.c, line: 512 hear I decided against it.

Dave Verwer

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News

Updates to the review guidelines around the new COPPA rules and requiring parental consent before allowing IAPs to be purchased. There are also sensible additional rules for gambling apps as well and a few other minor updates. Changes to this document are always worth keeping up to date on as there is nothing worse than a nasty surprise after months of development.

This excellent series of posts by Jeff LaMarche cover the process of designing and developing a new game for iOS. Every one of these articles is worth a read but I particularly enjoyed “Finding a Smaller Game in the Backstory” (#4) and “Experiments in Environment Creation” (#8). Be sure to check back on this post as time goes on for more diary entries.

Tools

Derek Selander with a look at some common techniques used to attack iOS applications. It’s a good reminder to always be aware of what you are shipping in your application bundle, not to store encryption keys embedded in strings inside your binary and how to use the keychain effectively. This is part one of a two part series so be be sure to read the follow up post which has already been published.

Code

Nick Lockwood with an open source implementation of the standard iOS navigation controller. Useful if you want to do heavy navigation customisation as you will fall down pretty quickly attempting to do that on iOS 6 or below.

Miguel de Icaza talks about the async and await keywords in C#. We obviously don’t have anything similar in Objective-C but it’s an interesting approach and I like it. It’s certainly very different to block based callbacks and definitely looks less like the construction of an Aztec temple but there are complexities lurking which I would imagine will take developers some time to get to grips with. The code demonstrated here is using Xamarin on iOS so I guess it still qualifies as iOS development.

macOS Development

Sam Marshall with a new Mac Framework for accessing iOS devices over USB without relying on private Apple frameworks. It allows devices to be detected, queried for hardware configuration, file transfers, access to app sandboxes and installation of apps.

Design

Not much to say about this other than this is a simple, fully editable, black and white Illustrator template from Blake Perdue for producing iOS app wireframes. A nice alternative to the Teehan+Lax PSD I linked to a couple of weeks back if you want to keep things a little more low fidelity.

I love when people publish iterations of a new icon design and I couldn’t resist linking to this one from Iconfactory. Follow the design of the iOS 7 icon for xScope Mirror’s icon through 5 versions ending in a beautiful icon which fits beautifully into the new OS.

Business and Marketing

A few months ago Stuart Hall started a little experiment on the app store by placing a small app live to test marketing approaches. Starting out with no marketing at all, then contacting the press, experimenting with pricing and in this update, adding in-app purchases. Both parts of this are well worth a read.

And finally...

“iOS for iWatch 1.01 ships, fixing the timezone issue”. A cruel but funny look into a possible future from Anil Dash.