Issue 116

18^th October 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

This very clear explanation of the security and internals of iMessage made for some interesting reading this week. The biggest surprise here is that iMessage transmits your actual password (over HTTPS, naturally) but I also found the discussion of the other issues and internals well worth a read.

Tools

Martin Pilkington on Storyboards. Certainly when they were first introduced with iOS 5 storyboards had some rough edges but I’m not sure I would agree they are still that controversial. However, the approach of using multiple storyboards as well as nib files is my default choice for everything but a trivial UI in iOS apps.

Code

I didn’t link to the wonderful 64 bit post by Mike Ash recently as I figured it had already been shared enough for everyone to have seen it but I will link to this one. Mike continues with what could be considered a follow up to the 64 bit post on the whys and hows of registers and RAM.

Handlebars is a really simple templating engine originally written in JavaScript and this week Bertrand Guiheneuf has been kind enough to open source his Objective-C implementation. If you do any significant amount of text output in your app then you might get some use out of this library.

Mike Abdullah with some notes on the new NSURLSession class in iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks. It’s a really nice upgrade to the NSURL* classes that have been previously available although I would agree with Mike that some reachability support built in would be an extremely useful enhancement for iOS 8.

macOS Development

A cautionary tale from Craig Hockenberry on code signing issues in Mavericks. Seems like Mac apps (even Developer ID signed apps) now require all nested bundles to also be signed. If you are submitting an app for next week’s Mavericks launch reading this will very likely save you a lot of pain.

Design

Raluca Budiu for Nielsen Norman Group with a thorough usability/UX rundown of iOS 7. Let me say first of all that I am a huge fan of the new UI in 7 and wouldn’t ever want to go back but there are some slight issues with it and they get some coverage here.

Over 300 iOS 7 styled icons with both outlined and filled versions, either for a selected image or if you are not fully on board with the outlined approach to iOS 7 icons. Both png and Illustrator/PDF formats are supplied in this lovely set.

Business and Marketing

Newsstand has always been an unusual one ever since it’s introduction with iOS 5. I think given that the technical advantages of Newsstand have mostly gone away with iOS 7 I would be inclined to agree with Marko Karppinen and say that I would publish without it if I were making a magazine app.

Seems like this isn’t breaking any App Store rules (it’s fine to only show certain purchase options depending on a situation) and so I am not surprised it has been allowed through review. Not sure if this is something I would get behind as a solution but it’s certainly a novel way to implement upgrade pricing.

And finally...

How many languages can you write Hello World in?