Issue 124

13^th December 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Plenty of discussion this week on apps prompting for ratings in the App Store. I am not particularly against this practice like so many people seem to be but I do think it should be approached with caution (for example, I dislike it when a rating prompt pops up after only one or two launches). It has been suggested before but I would love to see Apple base ratings on usage and install time as well as customer reviews. If an app survives on my phone for an extended period of time, I like it. If I use it every day, I love it. However, in the absence of this kind of rating system, take Rene’s advice and go rate your favourite apps with five stars right now.

Tools

Clever idea from Marin Usalj and Delisa Mason, XCPretty takes the output from xcodebuild and pretty prints it in real time. It will colourise and simplify the output and even has an option to make your test runs output in an RSpec style. This looks great.

Ever been annoyed by copying and pasting objects in Interface Builder and instantly losing all Auto Layout constraints along the way? Daniel Jalkut suggests a solution of manually editing the XML file … wait … WHAT? I can see that this is going to potentially save hours of work adding constraints back in but things need to be pretty desperate on the tools front by the time you get to hand editing a XIB file.

It’s a good news, bad news situation with third party documentation integration in Xcode 5. Bad news is that there is no easy way to add 3rd party docsets but the good news is that Václav Slavík has developed this tool to replace that functionality. This isn’t brand new but I just came across it this week.

Code

Terry Worona with a very attractive implementation of a non modal alert message view for iOS 7. Support for tapping to dismiss or optionally perform a callback and several different styles. Worth looking at if you are looking to remove some UIAlertView modals from your iOS 7 apps.

Nick Lockwood with a new set of serialisation/deserialisation classes. Support is included for bootstrapping seed data and also pointers/references to other objects with an aliasing feature. Looks really good.

Jordan Kay with a new project based on some initial work from Jonathan Wight around putting together a smarter table view. Mensa includes support for auto sizing cells based on their content (as long as Auto Layout is being used) and view controller based cell prototypes to allow easier reuse of cell based content across your app. Some interesting ideas here.

Klaas Pieter Annema with a lightweight REST client for Objective-C. Based on top of AFNetworking with simple routing, serialisation and mapping built in. Biggest downside I can see here is that there are quite a lot of dependencies needed, including AFNetworking 1.x which may cause conflicts with your app if you are using 2.x.

Design

Lengthy interview with Gentry Underwood, creator of Mailbox for iOS talking about his work before starting Mailbox, his prototyping and design process and the Dropbox acquisition and how it is allowing the company to scale more quickly.

And finally...

Ask “why?” instead.