Issue 130

24^th January 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

As you may have seen on my Twitter this week, I am in the process of building an iOS Dev Weekly app. The app will deliver the same content as the email but with offline support for reading the articles and easier sharing/saving to reading list services. If you have a couple of minutes free, I would really value your feedback on a couple of questions related to the app.

Dave Verwer

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News

This new page on Apple’s support site is invaluable. I’ve taken to putting coloured stickers on all of our old test devices but if you’re looking for an easy way to identify whether an old device is an iPhone 4 or a 4s then this document has all the model number and identifying marks that will save you booting up 14 devices to find the one you need.

It was always going to be interesting to watch what happened to Cocos after SpriteKit was released. I would have predicted a move towards a more cross-platform market which they have done by integrating Apportable to give Android support without having to switch away from Objective-C. If, like me, you haven’t checked out Cocos 2D for a while then I would urge you to watch the SpriteBuilder video linked from this article, it really shows off the power of this framework now that it has reached it’s third major version.

Tools

Hockey and Testflight are already serving everything over HTTPS so they are not affected but if you are self-hosting then this has the potential to be disastrous when 7.1 rolls out. The worst bit about this change is it seemingly does not even warrant a mention in the beta release notes. The release notes for iOS versions have a history of occasionally missing important details so I really hope they get updated before the final release to give companies a chance to prepare themselves before devices start getting upgraded.

If you’re looking for something like clang-format that you can use today then you might want to check this out. Instead of automatically reformatting code, this app takes the approach of flagging warnings or errors when a style guide is not adhered to. I have been close to linking to this before but have previously run into stability problems when using it, however I tried it again this week and they all seem to be fixed now so if you had given up on it previously you might want to take another look.

Neat little command line utility to identify unused class and header files inside an Xcode project. It also has the ability to delete the identified unused files but I would apply a little caution with that (or at the very least ensure that you are all checked in before running it) as it showed some false positives like classes which were only referenced inside Storyboard/XIB files.

Code

Drew McCormack with an article on some code which has emerged from the ongoing work on his Ensembles Core Data sync framework. The idea of this code is to allow you to treat iCloud like a regular web service with a simpler interface than that provided by the built in iCloud APIs. This looks really good if you are looking for a way to quickly and simply store files on iCloud without needing Core Data sync.

I agree with every point Ash Furrow makes here, including the point about not including unnecessary headers which are included in the PCH (with the noted exception of library code). There is nothing hugely ground breaking here but as the language has recently been changing quite quickly (compared to the last 20 years at least) it’s worth making sure you’re taking advantage of the recent enhancements.

macOS Development

It’s always sad to see the end of a product but I’m happy to see that OmniGraphSketcher is being open sourced, rather than simply abandoned for two reasons. First, I occasionally used it for presentations and documents, but also this is a non-trivial Mac app written by some of the best in the business. It’s fascinating to get a glimpse into the source code for one of their apps. Bravo for making it able to compile out of the box as well, this isn’t a trivial build process and it worked first time for me (as it should, but it’s worth mentioning).

Business and Marketing

I wasn’t aware that the App Store title was searched by spotlight before reading this article by Alex Klein. You might want to think about adding some keywords to your App Store title with your next release. I wonder if Apple will ever add App Store search results to spotlight like this? Obviously installed apps would be listed first but imagine if you searched in spotlight for an app and listed below the apps already on the device were links to apps that you had not yet installed.

And finally...

Just in case there wasn’t enough crazy in your app.