Issue 111

13^th September 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Everyone was using NSInteger, right?

Dave Verwer

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News

If you were planning to get an app into the 7 store for day one then hopefully you had it ready to submit as of the end of the keynote as submissions opened up just a short time after Elvis Costello left the stage. As expected, review times are rising sharply at the moment so if you are in the queue I wish you good luck on getting it live in time.

I have been saying this the whole way through the beta to anyone who will listen that iBeacon is the biggest feature of iOS 7 which no one is talking about. If you are not up to speed yet then Hari Gottipati has a good overview of the technology and potential uses here.

Tools

I mentioned back in February that I thought it was interesting that Clang was getting support for 64 bit ARM merged in and sure enough we got to see the first 64 bit iOS devices announced this week. If you are wondering what you need to worry about then Apple have helpfully provided a transitioning guide. Mostly common sense but worth a check anyway. Developer Login Required

James Dempsey with an update to his useful device matrix. We drew a big chart up on the whiteboard this week to sort out what devices needed to have what installed on them to give ourselves a decent set of testing devices. Now I just need to charge them all up.

Code

Michael Tsai with a round up of some talk from the Cocoa Dev email list. Everything I had heard previously suggested that there would be only a very minor (if any) performance implication from ARC. It does make sense that with the additional reliability and convenience would come some kind of performance penalty but I had not heard talk about it before. Please don’t read this as advice to abandon ARC though! As with all performance issues, if you are concerned about this then you need to measure your own situation before working on it. If that involves a few additional __unsafe_unretained variables then fine but please don’t turn ARC off!

Putting together an In-App Purchase implementation still seems more work than it should be and there are loads of helper classes around. This one by Hermes Pique is similar in functionality to many others but it stands out as it seems well designed and is comprehensively documented.

OpenEars is a library I have been aware of for a little while now but this week saw a significant release with the addition of Spanish recognition and synthesis. Support for multiple languages is a huge step forward for a framework like this and it all works offline as well. There is some seriously impressive technology here.

Need to tell if your app is running with the new iOS 7 UI? Pete Steinberger has the answer with a little code snippet which does exactly that. I love the name but he is absolutely right, it’s legacy as of next week.

macOS Development

UICollectionView for Mac OS X? Yes please. It’s not a complete implementation as yet but this class from Jonathan Willing looks promising.

Business and Marketing

Following on from the Omni links over the last couple of weeks, along with twitter conversations. Scotty invited Ken Case and Drew McCormack onto the iDeveloper podcast to debate the pros and cons of upgrade pricing vs Apple’s current model. I think this probably wraps up what can be said on the subject but it’s worth a listen.

And finally...

Amazing…