Issue 11

14^th October 2011

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Yet more sad news this week with Dennis Richie passing away. Would any of us be where we are today without either Dennis or Steve’s contribution to computing? I know I wouldn’t and the world is a poorer place with the loss of them both.

Dave Verwer

News

I know you are all fully aware that iOS 5 shipped this week but actually while skimming Nik Fletcher’s article yesterday I learned a couple of things about iOS 5 which I didn’t know, even after months of running betas. (Custom vibration alerts and text shortcuts, if you’re wondering 😀)

Does the release of a major iOS version have any effect on the bandwidth of an ISP? Short answer, yes. Interesting that the iPlayer (The BBC on demand TV service for those not in the UK) traffic took a significant dip during the evening.

Tools

Not really iOS or even development focused but I thought some of you might be interested in this post by Brendan Gregg.

Code

Now that the NDA is lifted I am sure we will see plenty of blogs covering the new iOS 5 APIs over the next few weeks however Steve Baranski was quick off the blocks last night with this in depth look at the new UIKit visual customisation APIs.

It is going to be a fun few months as we all get to grips with the edges of ARC. Jiva DeVoe with a look at blocks and retain cycles.

I came across this great little snippet from Daniel Dickison on Stack Overflow this week for animating a snapshot of the screen down into a tab bar icon, iOS camera style. It is always a good learning experience to reproduce some of the custom UI that Apple uses in its apps and and this is a great example of doing exactly that.

Design

Mobile optimised versions of fonts that come with a license for redistribution inside iOS apps? Sounds good to me.

Business and Marketing

I have noticed more and more apps using pushing the limits of the developer agreement regarding push notifications recently but Shazam have stepped over the line with their push notifications straying into pure advertising.

I really liked the comments in Shane Crawford’s latest blog post about still giving feedback, no matter how hard it is to deliver. “Just as bad as not being able to take feedback is never giving it. Floating merrily along accepting the status quo lies in a direct line towards failure. Yours or someone else’s.”