Issue 123

6^th December 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Whilst adoption of iOS 7 has certainly slowed down now, an official figure of 74% is an incredible stat after only three months in the wild. It’s also great news to see that Apple are maintaining up to date adoption numbers on their support site as well.

There have been many predictions that iBeacons would be used in surprising ways and sure enough this caught my eye this week. The only issue here I can’t see any reason why these beacons couldn’t be quietly duplicated in order to grant access to the content from other locations and I can’t see publishers being too excited about that. Still, top marks for implementing iBeacon in new and unusual ways.

Tools

To me, the biggest downside of AppCode was always that it had no support for visual designing of UI files but this week saw a release of a beta version of the UI Designer in AppCode. It currently only supports the old XIB file format and only for iOS apps (not OS X) but they have promised to support new XIBs and Storyboards at some point. If you use AppCode, this will likely be the highlight of your week.

I had no idea that promo codes were tied to a specific version of an app. One to watch out for if you use this for pre-release promotional copies being sent to reviewers.

Jonathan Wight with a handy LLDB script to log out the return value of a function after returning from it. It’s one of those small annoyances of debugging return values that often results in a copy paste of the return expression or a temporary intermediate variable. This is now firmly installed in my .lldbinit.

Code

Meng To and Jamz Tang with a new library intended to move configuration for animations, custom fonts (and more in the future) into Interface Builder using custom object properties. I can see this being instantly useful in producing prototypes and mockups of apps but always wonder about this kind of library and how it will integrate into a real app. Certainly worth a look though.

Ole Gammelgaard with a clear, simple example of using RACCommand from Reactive Cocoa. I was commenting to someone just a few days ago that Reactive Cocoa could really benefit from more practical, real world examples and my wish was granted almost immediately. I must admit I am still not convinced to use it but it’s an interesting article nonetheless.

Nick Jensen with a beautiful, Safari style progress indicator designed to fit just under a navigation bar.

Design

Steven Ramkumar on the design of the iOS 7 version of Pinterest for iOS. The article goes through the reasoning behind the design decisions and ends up digging into some of the code used. Great post.

Great set of icons for representing various types of gestures commonly used in iOS apps (and a QR code one too) ready for use in mockups and design documents. Beatifully drawn, easy to understand and royalty free. What more could you want?

Business and Marketing

Marco Arment on the (non-technical) difficulties of Apple’s renewable subscription In-App Purchases. His solution? Just do it yourself, use a single non-renewable subscription and then prompt the user again when it expires. From a purely consumer perspective, I know that signing up to a renewable In-App Purchase makes me think twice because they are such a pain to unsubscribe from so I am in favour of this.

Videos

A smörgåsbord of conference videos for you all this week. First up is Çingleton with talks from Jessie Char, Christina Warren, Jonathan Deutsch, Dave Teare, Matt Drance, Sebastiaan de With, Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch, Dan Moren and Scott Simpson. There is so much great content here.

More videos, this time from the NSScotland conference with talks from Jamie Montgomerie, Graham Lee, Matt Gemmell, Simon Wolf, Gordon Murrison, Lori Olson, Steven Baker, Matt Robinson and Neil Inglis on all manner of topics.

And finally...

I always thought it was “Implementation”.