Issue 108

23^rd August 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

See how one iOS game raced to the top 50 grossing charts and maintains a 4.5-star rating by connecting directly with users in-app and the “secret weapon” they use to do it.

News

If your solution to having uniqueIdentifier deprecated was to use the MAC address of the device in some way then you’re going to have a bad time in iOS 7. If your solution to having the availability of the MAC address removed is to use anything other than the supported methods mentioned here then you’re going to have a bad time at some point in the future. The message here is very clear, Apple are not afraid to remove any API that makes tracking users across apps by different vendors possible.

Apple announced a complete revamp of the affiliate program for iTunes content this week and David Smith has taken a quick look at the changes for us. Unfortunately you need to sign up again for this new scheme but it’s not a difficult process and if you are writing or promoting any apps at all then you really should be taking advantage of the additional revenue that can be found here.

Tools

We have a wonderful array of third party tools available to us which can make our lives as developers a little easier. Ben Scheirman has put together a comprehensive list of 75 of the best tools available today.

A great reminder by Erica Sadun to make use of your DTS tickets that you receive along with your iOS and Mac OS developer program memberships. DTS has worked really well for me in a few situations and outside of WWDC this is the only way to get solid code level support from Apple. Are yours still lying unsed?

Code

Brand new project from Francis Chong for parsing HTML documents with a chainable syntax for quickly finding and modifying an HTML (or XML) document. I haven’t had a chance to test this out yet but it’s a problem I have struggled to solve before so I thought it might be worth a look.

If you have ever tried to customise the visuals of a UIPopoverController then you will appreciate this replacement from Nicolas Cheng. This is a reimplementation of a popover controller rather than a simplification of the existing customisability but the upside is that it supports the iPhone as well as the iPad.

I really like the expansion to the “swipe to delete” gesture that Apple is using in iOS 7 and the platform has been needing a more consistent way to expose functionality like this across apps. This post sees Ash Furrow implement a “swipe to delete, and more…” control with a nice step by step walkthrough of the code needed.

ReactiveCocoa got a 2.0 release this week, the (huge) list of changes here gives a great sense of what has changed. The 2.0 API is incompatible with 1.x releases so approach upgrades with a little caution but if you haven’t had a chance to check RAC out yet then this may be a good point to take a look.

Design

Ivo Mynttinen with an updated cheat sheet for iOS 7 design with quick access to some useful tips and commonly needed dimensions for the platform. If you are interested in this then it’s also worth mentioning that by now you really should be familiar with the updated iOS 7 Human Interface Guidelines which have been available during the beta. It’s an incredibly valuable document but one that is easy to forget about.

Aubrey Johnson on how hollow icons may be taxing our poor user’s brains a little too much in iOS 7. I would love to read some of the science behind this and unfortunately you won’t find much of that here but it’s something you might want to be thinking about.

Business and Marketing

John Moltz on in-app purchases. In his words “What we should be asking is simply whether or not we’re spending what the app is worth. We’ve spent a lot of time decrying the race to the bottom in app pricing. Now we’re complaining because app developers have found a way to make more money”.

And finally...

Daniel Jalkut on remaining relevant. I couldn’t agree more and I am always at my happiest while digging into something new.