Issue 120

15^th November 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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The Facebook SDK for Unity makes it faster and easier to integrate your Unity game with Facebook. There’s no need to write platform specific code, so you can stay in C#. Get up and running in less than a day and start providing social game experiences to all your players.

News

Great news from Apple this week. Apps can now have up to a hundred promo codes generated per version (up from the previous limit of 50). There has been no official word on this yet but there have been several reports of it and I also checked our account and I am seeing the same thing. Hey Apple, while you’re in the mood for increasing numbers how about bumping up the limit on number of development/test devices?

Steffen Itterheim has done some research into the popularity of 2D game frameworks on iOS and discovers some bad news for Cocos 2D after the release of iOS 7. Unity seems to be unaffected which I am not too surprised about as it is a very different beast to Sprite Kit. Just one thing I would mention, the number of people asking questions on Stack Overflow and googling for a tutorial are an indication of a future trend, but I wouldn’t imagine this is actually affecting the number of games shipping just yet.

Tools

The biggest issue for me with tools like Reveal which you want to use in development but would never want to ship their libraries in an App Store release is that I really don’t want the tool infiltrating my build process very much, if at all. Wouldn’t it be safer if Reveal could be integrated and activated directly from LLDB? Yes? Read on… The library still needs to be shipped along with the app but this feels neater than an #ifdef. Note: Last week’s issue was sponsored by Reveal but I would have linked to this anyway as it’s too cool not to.

How well do you know the Xcode build process? This article from Florian Kugler in the latest objc.io (which you should already be reading all of) takes a deeper look into what happens when you hit ⌘B. We are so spoiled by having a one button build process that I would be surprised if you didn’t learn at least one thing by reading this.

Code

This is a beautiful custom collection view layout by Niels de Hoog. I recently made a layout similar to this but it had a ragged end to it (which didn’t matter too much as it was (virtually) infinite scrolling. This is a much better approach than I used as it guarantees a square edge to the end of the layout. It’s an implementation of “The Partition Problem” translated into Objective-C and it works beautifully.

Following last week’s open source release of Inkpad, this week sees Steve Sprang also open source his Inkpad’s more famous brother, Brushes. Back in 2009 this app was used by Jorge Colombo to draw cover images for the New Yorker. This is a great slice of history, I wonder what he will release next week.

How about a swipe out “drawer” view controller with all the playfulness of UI Dynamics integrated right into it to give it that iOS 7 shine? Well Eric Horacek has released a library this week which does exactly that. It looks to be well documented and written for a general use case rather than to fix a specific problem which makes it worth a look.

Design

Thoughtful article from Jacob Penderworth on how the design of iOS 7 apps, even from Apple, is still maturing. I am not surprised at all by this and several people predicted it happening both for Apple and 3rd party apps. I do find it interesting that the design of the new iPad remote app is echoing OS X iTunes rather than being given the iOS 7 spin.

Business and Marketing

A set of five real world iPhone and iPad images which you can slot your screenshots into. This kind of thing has been done several times but I thought this one was worth linking to as there is real care taken here over the processing of the images with things like depth of field being added automatically by the photoshop document and they are high enough resolution to be used for print as well as web.

This retrospective from David Smith on his adventures with the App Store made a good read this week and made me think back about all the apps we have build or worked on over the years. Go and dig out the source for your first Objective-C app and either make yourself feel bad about how bad it was or good about how far you have come.

And finally...

This is a brilliant and terrifying idea from Martin Naumann all at the same time. How long until someone ships an app using this as a back end?