Issue 117

25^th October 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

mdevcon in Appsterdam, a conference for mobile developers, by mobile developers has opened its call for papers for the 2014 edition (March 7th and 8th) and we are looking for technical conference sessions and tutorials. Lodging and travel to Amsterdam will be arranged for accepted speakers. Until the CfP is over, a limited amount of ‘friends of mdevcon’ tickets are available at a reduced price.

News

You will already be aware of this if you tried to set an app live this week like we did. Contact details for a “trade representative” must now be present for the Korean App Store before any new apps or updates can go live. If you work for, or with, a larger company then it might take a few days to get this information sorted out so get it done now before this holds up your next release. A little notice would have been nice!

This is absolutely bonkers. I am not sure I am the target market and I really don’t like the idea of my email being proxied through LinkedIn servers but I do love the ingenuity of how they put this together. Social networks will always find a way.

Tools

Write Android apps with Objective-C, no Java or expensive reengineering required? Including support for UIKit, Core Data, Core Animation, Cocos2D and even things like Push Notifications and StoreKit which map into the Google equivalents this tool looks remarkable. I was skeptical when I first watched this video and of course there are some caveats, but this really does seem like a much less painful way to ship an Android version. Especially interesting was the ability to build additional, custom Android functionality with Objective-C either to customise it or to add support for Android only features like the hardware back button. Incredible.

Fascinating article by Jack Chen the development of his new Xcode plugin to add fuzzy matching to the Xcode code completion drop downs. I really enjoyed the description of using dtrace to track down the correct slice of Xcode to hook into and the plugin itself looks great.

Ever wanted to have an Xcode unit test to compare the visuals of a UIView with a known image? Well Jonathan Dann and Todd Krabach have been kind enough to release this XCTestCase subclass which does exactly that. Never again will you ship that bright red background colour which you temporarily set while debugging your app.

Code

David Rönnqvist with an in-depth look at CAMediaTiming. It’s a great overview of one of the less known parts of Core Animation and while I have previously come across the timeOffset trick that he mentions, this is a good reminder that it exists and some nice sample code if you haven’t experimented with it yet.

Want to get technical with the details of gaussian blurs in the constant struggle for an iOS 7 style blur effect at a decent frame rate? Brad Larson has recently rewritten the gaussian blur component of the wonderful GPUImage library and goes into detail on how he extracted some increased performance.

The loading of images on iOS is an area where every millisecond counts. This new library recently open sourced by Path, takes the tried and trusted approach of trying to “do less stuff” by creating an uncompressed sprite atlas style image as a one time task for super quick loading whenever they need to be displayed.

Everything you ever wanted to know about SpriteKit but were afraid to ask. Great site.

macOS Development

The next instalment of “Craig Hockenberry fights with the App Store on Mavericks” is in. Spoiler: Not good news.

Design

Jared Sinclair on borderless buttons in iOS 7. Unlike Jared, I really like the design of iOS 7 but I do think that the borderless buttons are probably the most questionable decision of the new UI. Regardless of whether I agree with him completely though, he makes some good points and this is worth reading.

And finally...

Best Cabel Sasser talk since the last one.