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News
iPhone 5s and 5c Marketing Resources
Apple updated the marketing resources section of their site this week and we are free to use the new iPhone, iPod and iPad in our marketing materials. The good news is that we now have devices in colours other than black. Bad news, no gold 5s included and only blue or white for the 5c.
Background Refresh and the Keychain
Hands up who's ever debugged code in a moving car? I have seen this issue manifest itself in several apps which are using background refresh. Turns out that if your app is being relaunched rather than just being reactivated by background refresh then you don't have access to keychain items unless you specifically request it.
Tools
Documentation in Xcode 5
Christopher Bowns digs into the new automatic documentation features of Xcode 5. I love how easy this is to add and that there is zero setup needed to get started so this gets a big thumbs up from me.
Rock Heads
Mark Dalrymple on tracking down a tricky performance problem with the Time Profiler in Instruments. If you ever wanted to know where you hid all those sleep() calls this will help you out 😃.
Code
HiBeacons
Great little iBeacon demo app from Nick Toumpelis. This is a simple app but we tested it out here in the office and it worked well. The code is extremely simple and this is a good introduction if you were excited about beacons but hadn't looked at what it takes to broadcast and detect them yet.
isEqualToDate:toUnitGranularity:
Oliver Foggin with a useful replacement for a method with the same name which appeared in the iOS 7 betas but was removed for the final release (I wonder why?). Don't worry too much about the unprefixed category method names in the blog post, the Github repo has prefixed methods so it will be safe if Apple ever add this back to NSCalendar.
UIMotionEffects for Dummies
Conor Winders with a nice category for reducing the amount of code needed to add motion effects to your UI elements on iOS 7. Strikes me that this could be a good use of outlet collections for the layers of controls to add motion effects to. Hey guys, I finally found a use for outlet collections!
Design
Designing for an inverted navbar in iOS 7
What colour should your status bar be? Light for dark backgrounds and dark for light backgrounds, right? Well, Max Rudberg suggests that it might not quite be as simple as this and I have to say I agree with him that this could be quite a problem depending on your app design (I think it's much more of an issue on darker backgrounds than light). Anyway, interesting article.
Business and Marketing
"Offers In-App Purchases"
Nik Fletcher with (amongst other things) details of the new API in iOS 7 to retrieve detailed information about the original purchase made when your app was downloaded from the store. Most importantly it's now possible to get the version number of your app when the purchase was made. There are lots of possibilities here.
How to run your business when you don’t know what you’re doing
This transcript of the talk given by Thijs van der Vossen at BubbleConf recently is an wonderful collection of advice and anecdotes about everything non-technical you need to think about when running a business. Great article.