Issue 112

20^th September 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So this week we learned that dismembered fingers won’t unlock the device with Touch ID. Great. But, what about the most cunning members of society? Start the countdown to the first Daily Mail story of Mum waking up to find that little Johnny authorised $485 of in-app purchases by quietly positioning her new 5s’ sensor under her finger during a post-dinner snooze.

Dave Verwer

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If you’re still scrambling to get your app updated for iOS 7, download this guide to ensure a smooth transition to the new OS. Already updated? Some great tips here from 3 top iOS apps for managing users’ expectations and keeping them happy.

News

So without warning this week saw Apple unleash a new feature which is a good step forward for some apps but a potential disaster for others. Allowing old versions of apps to be downloaded is a great idea in theory but as Kyle Richter points out there are some significant downsides to it. Since launching this feature, Apple have updated it to allow specific old versions to be removed from sale but this doesn’t solve the problems that we are now selling versions of an app which can’t ever have bug fixes applied to them. It feels a little like this wasn’t thought through before being implemented.

Note: In the article linked here it is not clear that the feature to remove specific versions from sale has actually been deployed by Apple and is live right now. We struggled to find the option to enable this but it does exist. Navigate into your app and then into to Rights and Pricing and then click Indicate a legal issue with iCloud for this app. Can I just be the first to say that this is a crazy place to hide this very important feature.

Just 36 hours in to iOS 7 being publicly available and adoption stats are being reported by various sources as over 30% adoption. I think it was reasonably predictable that there would be a huge rush by a set of early adopters for this but it will be interesting to see if this trend carries on past 60%. Fingers crossed.

Tools

Xcode 5 includes Quick Look for easy access to non-trivial data types like images and HTML source however this is currently not available from the LLDB console. Ryan Olson has put together an Xcode 5 plugin which allows just that. However the big feature here is being able to inspect views visually by snapshotting them to an image so even if console access to Quick Look isn’t tempting, that feature should be.

Amazingly quick work from Landon Fuller on updating PLCrashReporter with support for ARM64 (which is obviously untested on real hardware at the moment) along with a whole host of other features and improvements as well.

Code

If you have been slacking on keeping up with the beta for the last few months then this is a great set of catch up posts which have been made available now that the NDA has been dropped. Covering the basics of most of the new tech in iOS 7 this is a great way to get up to speed quickly.

Marco Arment with an alpha release of a new library built on top of FMDB and SQLite for people looking for more of the structure and convenience offered by Core Data but without it actually being Core Data, and while still allowing direct SQL access, etc… Worth a look.

So it looks like iOS 7 has broken the pasteboard mechanism that Smile were using to share snippets in their iOS 6 compatible apps which is a shame. However the main reason I am linking to this is it highlights just what a terrible state data sharing between apps is in on iOS. No reflection on the Smile team here, they did what they needed to do to make their app work but sharing data through a reminder is a pretty awkward solution both for developers and users who will wonder why these apps need access to their reminder data compared to something like “App would like to access data stored by TextExpander Touch”. Maybe we will see some kind of solution in iOS 8 eh?

Holy Table Views Batman.

Design

The Verge have published a fascinating and comprehensive look at the design and feature changes to iOS over the first 6 years of its short but eventful life. Looking at how each individual version of iOS comparecd to the last sometimes feels a little underwhelming but laying the changes out all at once like in this article really brings home the significance of those 7 versions so far. I can’t even imagine where we will be in 7 more years.

Want some before and after screenshots of apps which have been updated for iOS 7, your wish is my command.

Next up, icons get the same treatment.

Business and Marketing

I liked this analysis of the move to 64 bit ARM by Sisir Koppaka. I am still holding out for an Apple TV SDK and it certainly has the potential to be a platform which could put a significant amount of memory (> 4Gb) to use if Apple were to decide to go after sections of the console market.

And finally...

Never gonna give you up…