Issue 113

27^th September 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

If you missed WWDC this year but still want to take a few gulps from the firehose then you may still be in luck as Apple are taking their one day touring version of WWDC back on the road. This year the event has been split into two days per city, one each for apps and games. If it’s anything like last year then people who didn’t manage to get a WWDC ticket will be prioritised over those that did which makes perfect sense. Good luck if you decide to apply for a spot.

Anything that improves network connectivity on mobile devices has to be a step in the right direction and it looks like iOS 7 shipped with support for fallback network connectivity through multi-path TCP. It appears that Siri is the only feature of the OS using this right now but hopefully it will be expanded to the rest of the OS (and 3rd party apps) in the future. Imagine not having to dive into the settings when you get trapped in a dead WiFi network.

Tools

As invaluable as the WWDC videos are they are ultimately hindered by their lack of searchability. So this week I was ecstatic to see that Mattt Thompson has published this site containing searchable audio transcripts from every WWDC 2013 session. What a great upgrade to a Spotlight search through the session PDF files.

By now you are all probably aware that taking Default.png images on iOS 7 is not as easy as just snapping a screenshot. iOS 7 requires that the status bar area is now included in launch screens but by default a screenshot also captures the status bar contents. This class allows screenshots to be taken which exclude the status bar content ready for use as a Default.png or ready to prep for your App Store listing with our Status Magic tool. Full disclosure: This open source project, and the Status Magic tool are both written by me

There sure are a lot of things to check before you release an app aren’t there? Someone should make a useful pre-release checklist. Dave Addey already wrote one you say? Then Oisín Hurley converted it to markdown and put it on GitHub for us all to use (and add to)? That’s OK then, as you were.

Code

As of 10am (PST) this morning we should have a new version of AFNetworking ready and waiting for us. 2.0 is a major change and includes a redesigned API and a completely new replacement for AFHTTPClient based around the new NSURLSession classes in iOS 7. There is a migration guide which is a good place to start (although it is slightly out of date at the moment, I am sure pull requests are welcome) but this looks like a fantastic v2 of my favourite open source Objective-C library.

I have been playing with the new interactive transitions recently and while the API is very good, sample code has been very hard to come by. This article by Colin Eberhardt takes a step by step look at what it takes to get one of these things running and is accompanied by a repository of sample transitions, both regular and interactive.

This is very likely not to directly affect you (you’re really using direct isa access in an app?) but it’s an interesting read and a peek under the surface of the 64 bit runtime. Notably, the 64bit iOS simulator does not include this change and I have seen a few other bug reports which are arm64 device only this week so just be cautious generally shipping 64 bit ARM code which hasn’t been tested on a real device.

macOS Development

Every time I open up one of our OS X apps in Xcode I have this feeling. As Matt Ronge says in this article, it’s not that Mac development is hard but there are just so many things that are easier to do on iOS, especially around custom UI. If you haven’t done any Mac development before, this is worth a read to see just how good we have it on iOS.

Design

Of all of the app updates/redesigns for iOS 7 so far, Mailbox is by far my favourite. Gentry Underwood talks about some of the decisions they made during the update.

Business and Marketing

Even if you are not in the UK, this is a good list of do’s and don’ts if you are producing a kids app for iOS (or any other platform). It will be interesting to see the adoption and consumer reaction to the Kids section in the App Store now it has launched.

What a mess the upgrade to Clear turned out to be earlier this week. Stephen Hackett talks about the latest in the ongoing saga of upgrade pricing, new versions of apps in the iOS app store and actually making a living from your apps.

And finally...

Anything you like.