Issue 13

28^th October 2011

Written by Dave Verwer

News

Anything that gets users to upgrade to iOS 5 quicker is going to go down well with me. David Barnard speculates the reasons for Apple requiring iOS 5 for their new apps.

I am amazed how well the UI to this 100% iPad game development app has turned out, what a great idea especially as a way to get kids interested in coding.

I do love a bit of Dropbox integration in iOS apps. In my opinion, Dropbox is absolutely the best solution for syncing files right now but storing app settings and other files/settings which are not intended to be modified by the user is a non-optimal solution where iCloud would be a much better fit. This is clearly on the minds of the Dropbox engineers with the new “App folders” API.

Tools

Boon Chew with some Xcode UI features you may not know about, I especially liked the “search within a jump bar list” feature but there is still a long way to go before the inbuilt features match the level of something like Code Pilot.

After mentioning Code Pilot it occurred to me that some of you might not have actually come across it yet. It really makes navigating around your code in Xcode much easier and is thoroughly recommended.

Code

Keith Harrison on probably the simplest of all of the iCloud APIs, preference syncing.

Amy Worrall on wrapping text to complex regions with Core Text. Surprisingly simple code for what could have been a really tricky problem to solve.

Tony Ngo with a short tutorial on integrating the new iOS 5 Twitter functionality. The only thing that annoys me about the iOS Twitter integration is that the app name always shows up as “iOS” rather than the app name.

I love that we have access to Core Image in iOS 5, but I had no idea it could do face detection. Krzystof Kunowski takes a look at CIDetector.

I came across this neat little library this week which gives a cleaner way to create multi-stage animations on iOS 4. If you are looking for the code, check the comments for the repository link as it is not linked from the main post.

Mugunth Kumar with an interesting approach to supporting the new iOS 5 JSON framework.

Design

I love sites like this, such a great source of inspiration. If you are new here you might also want to google for “Well Placed Pixels”, “Pttrns” and “Mac Apps that Rock” which are similar sites that I have linked to in the past.

Business and Marketing

A comprehensive look at sales across a variety of educational apps by Pierre Abel of L’Escapadou.

Interesting stats from journalism.org looking at tablet usage in the US for news content. Given that recent stats showed that the iPad was responsible for 97% of US tablet sales this must mean that ~11% of the US population owns an iPad, that’s impressive.