Issue 114

News

Apple motion in Lodsys case dismissed

A disappointing development in the ongoing Lodsys legal cases. I am sure we were all hoping that Apple would be the white knight and ride in to save us all, taking away the threat around IAPs. Unfortunately the Apple motion was dismissed by the judge in the case and so we are back on our own. However if you read all the way down to the end of the article, it looks like we may have found a friend in Martha Stewart (Sentences I thought I would never write #61).

MLB and iBeacon

This is the first implementation of iBeacon I have seen in the field (pun intended). Seems like it's currently in testing but they are planning some really nice integration between the stadiums and iOS devices using beacons. Even this first planned iteration looks to be impressive though. From automatically showing your ticket barcode as you approach the turnstiles, guiding you to your seat and then showing you additional information as the game progresses, it sounds amazing.

Tools

Xcode Asset Catalogs

Nic Schlueter with a nice rundown on Asset Catalogs in Xcode 5/iOS 7.

iOS Delta App Updates on iOS 7

I linked to this article back in Issue 106 but after a discussion around asset catalogs and how they would work with the new .car file format this week on Twitter it emerged that the document was updated along with the release of iOS 7. Sounds like Apple are now doing binary diffs on all files for delta updates which is great news.

Xcode 5 Plugin Template

Delisa Mason has published a useful template for anyone wanting to start work on a plugin for Xcode. Take it and create some amazing plugins for our new toy.

Code

Ensembles

Drew McCormack released an initial version of his new Core Data sync library this week. It is back-end agnostic (supporting any online file storage service, including iCloud) and has some interesting ideas in terms of conflict sync. It's early days but this is a promising entry into the sync framework arena.

JazzHands

JazzHands is a new keyframe animation library which has been extracted from the IFTTT iOS app during development. It could be used for any kind of animation but is designed around multi part scrolling introduction/tutorial views that have become common across many iOS apps. It's pretty simple to put an animation together and the results look great.

Text Kit Tutorial

I have been doing some work with TextKit this week and it's definitely one of the more immediately useful APIs which were delivered with iOS 7. The only puzzling piece is the letterpress effect which seems like more of an iOS 6 thing. Anyway, if you haven't got to grips with it yet then Colin Eberhardt dives in and gives us a tour.

Objective-C SO

This is a Twitter account which sends out links to iOS and Objective-C Stack Overflow posts a few times a day. I have been following it for a couple of weeks now and it has thrown up several posts which have been interesting to read and it's not overwhelming in the amount of posts it makes per day. Recommended.

Business and Marketing

Real World Price Dynamics

Lots more talk this week about In-App purchases. This interview between David Smith and his wife Lauren gives a great view of the situation from the consumer perspective.

The Future is Here

Kevin Hoctor continues the In-App Purchase theme and shows some crazily high IAP conversion rates from his recently released iPad app. While I have been personally convinced that IAPs are the future for a while now there have also been several tweets from developers this week who have been saying it's not all over in terms of paid apps but none of them seem to have blogged about it. If you are reading this and want to write about it then I would love to feature some posts from the other side of this coin.

Videos

360 iDev 2013 videos

Over fourty videos published by 360 iDev from their conference in Denver recently. This is a great resource and a generous gesture by the conference organisers.

And finally...

Unleashing Genetic Algorithms on the iOS 7 Icon

The pursuit of the perfect squircle.

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Issue 114 October 4th 2013

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