Issue 121

22^nd November 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So the first beta of iOS 7.1 hit this week and while there doesn’t look to be anything hugely exciting in terms of new APIs, Xcode 5.1 has had some decent enhancements. Let’s hope for a few bug fixes in with the mix of additional accessibility features and other visual changes when it ships.

Dave Verwer

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News

Looks like it’s a special case and is only enabled for this one app right now but Apple have to be looking to roll this out for everyone in the future. This is a huge deal for App Store listings.

Turn your shiny new iPhone 5s into a Nokia N-Gage with the new iOS game controllers that have started to finally appear this week. I am not quite sure what I expected these to look like but I was a little surprised to see it was a full wrap around device although it makes sense as you don’t want the screen too disconnected from the action. I will be watching how popular these are with consumers closely.

Tools

Recorded earlier this year at Cocoaheads North Carolina this video sees Chris Stroud talking about reverse engineering iOS apps. Using the Interesting app by Mike Rundle as his victim he goes through inspecting the app and then modifying it at runtime. I really enjoyed watching this.

This extensive series of tutorials on how to create a game with the Unity toolkit is a little slow in places but is split into smaller videos so it’s easy to focus in on what you want to learn. Delivered by Asbjørn Thirslund he starts with the absolute basics but ends up in something that is well on its way to being a real game. If you are just getting started with Unity then you might want to check this out.

The amount of open source libraries and code snippets flowing through CocoaPods these days is staggering. Cory Alder has created this iOS app to keep track of all of the new and updated pods so if you are looking for an easy way to stay updated on what’s new in pod specs then you should check this out.

Code

Dustin Bachrach with a fascinating experiment into creating custom defined object literals to add to Objective-C. I linked to a similar experiment previously on iOS Dev Weekly but it required messing with the compiler whereas this implementation needs no modifications to the compiler or the runtime. It originally relied on swizzling but has been updated during the week to become a little more “World Ready” as Dustin calls it.

Drew Crawford on tracking down a tricky ARC/blocks issue which he found while using the block based NSNotificationCenter APIs. There is no actual bug here and there has been some discussion on the merits of this post during the week but I think it serves as a reminder that it’s really easy to get caught out with retain cycles when dealing with blocks like this and not enough people really understand what happens with blocks retaining their variables.

Design

I recently subscribed to this cute little tumblr which contains a mix of mocked up and real world designs along with various other images for inspiration. I find it a nice way to keep my mind thinking on iOS 7 design while I check my RSS throughout the week.

Business and Marketing

Prompted by the piece by Michael Lopp on why he quit using Things this week, Daniel Jalkut talks about the compromises necessary between big ticket features and more subtle maintenance. Working on the minor features and the hard to reproduce bugs isn’t sexy but it’s a very necessary part of long term development of a piece of software. I liked Daniel’s final point that it’s difficult to think like a developer when considering development of your favourite pieces of software and the need for patience while you do so.

And finally...

Clearly meant in jest but at the same time it makes a lot of sense.