Issue 110

6^th September 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

4 more sleeps.

Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

Having a decent site and a well-reviewed app only goes so far. This app developer decided to change their strategy and focus on how users find the app and why they buy IAPs. The end results were fascinating: not only did they get more users into the app, but the average revenue per user went up as well.

News

We obviously don’t know the whole story here as to why this happened but from the wording in this article it sounds like Apple threatened Omni with removal of their apps from the store if they continued with their OmniKeyMaster plan mentioned last week. If this is what happened then it can only hurt the App Store as it will make more developers reconsider the future of their app before choosing to sell through the MAS. Bad news.

I have heard several people talking about the possibility of the iPad release of iOS 7 being delayed briefly. I don’t know if this rumour has any basis in truth or not but my guess is that if this does happen then iOS 7 only apps that are universal will simply disappear from the iPad store until 7 appears. I would bet that we will find out the final release schedule, including any iPad delays at the event next week before the final release to the public so there will be time to make plans based on that information.

Tools

Ever had merge conflicts with a pbxproj file? Of course you have. Daniel Tull has discovered a useful little script which comes straight out of the WebKit project which will alphabetise all source files inside your Xcode project. Not only does this cut down on pbxproj merge conflicts but you also get a shiny organised project out of it. Excellent.

This new site from Adam Swinden is a nice single page list of tools for iOS development. It’s been on my list of ideas for a long time now to make a site like this from the Tools section of this email but Adam has saved me a job. If you spot anything missing from this list, he is also taking suggestions to help fill the list out.

Code

Due for release simultaneously alongside iOS 7, KoboldKit is a SpriteKit based game framework for creating 2D platform games. I linked to an article from Steffen Itterheim on 2D platforming games and physics engines a couple of weeks ago from the development of KoboldKit. It now appears to be ready for release and is just waiting for the NDA to be lifted. I wonder how many other frameworks we will see build on top of SpriteKit as time goes on?

Eli Ganem with a nice rundown of some common design patterns used in iOS apps. He runs through MVC (obviously), Singletons, Facades, Decorators, Adapters, Mementos and Observers in this article with a look how to implement them yourself or a peek into how they are already used in the iOS SDK.

Gus Mueller has open sourced a set of classes for reading and writing PSD files in Objective-C this week. This is most definitely not a trivial task and so this is a wonderful resource to have open sourced.

Remember all those standard colours that Apple talked about during the iOS 7 keynote? Well, Claas Lange has been kind enough to pop them all into a category for us.

macOS Development

I have linked to both Reveal and Spark Inspector over the last couple of months here and Interface Inspector looks to be the same idea but Mac app UI hierarchy inspection. I have been using Reveal recently to debug some UI code and it has become an integral part of my debugging toolkit, I am sure this will be the same for those of us working on Mac apps as well as iOS.

Business and Marketing

Adam Grossman on the hesitance that we have all observed with paid apps. He uses it to argue again for time limited trials. Will we ever see this happen on the App Stores? I do hope so but I’m not holding my breath.