Issue 132

7^th February 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Thomas Baekdal with a blunt look at the state of freemium on the App Store. There is nothing wrong with freemium in itself and clearly this model is working right now (the worst offenders come straight out of the top grossing chart) but I do feel there has to be a backlash from users at some point. It feels like annoying users is this year’s business model, but probably isn’t next year’s. I’m sure Freemium will still feature strongly for a long time to come but it’s time to get back to making games fun rather than annoying.

Lots of talk this week about how very large apps work with Xcode and I’m sure that’s what prompted Anthony Roldan to write this article on how he uses CocoaPods to build large apps. I haven’t seen anyone else trying this approach before by separating each section of a large app into smaller, stand alone apps and then using CocoaPods to gather everything together into the main app. Interesting idea.

Tools

Nik Fletcher on taking advantage of a relatively unknown feature of iTunes Connect, its support for automation via XML metadata files. Nik goes through some good tips on working with these files, and has written a useful little app which gives a GUI to the command line tool.

Code

I linked to an article by Theodore Calmes back in Issue 119 about implementing clustering of annotation points inside MapKit. Claus Höfele has taken the code from that article and turned it into a component which can be easily integrated into any view controller providing the same functionality from the original article. Great work.

Justin DeWind with a practical example of implementing some basic Reactive Cocoa magic into an app. He uses the example of replacing the UISearchBar delegate with RAC signals and walks through every step in a very understandable way. If you have been struggling to get on board with Reactive Cocoa then this walk through gives a gentle introduction by way of something you will already be very familiar with.

Brad Grzesiak on applying the single responsibility principle when developing for iOS. Especially in view controller code, it can be very easy to let it slip away from you and end up in Massive View Controller land. If you are tying to pursue that noble goal then this article will be of interest.

We have a wonderful array of animation techniques on iOS but with every extra API comes more questions about whether you are “doing it right”. I would happily read every word that David Rönnqvist writes about animation code but this article should be made essential reading if you are working with Core Animation code. Oh and if you’re reading this David, I wouldn’t have been able to resist calling that section “avoid removedOnCompletion = NO”.

Design

New blog by Brian Lovin which seems to be purely concerned with dissecting the details of iOS apps. He has started by taking a deep look at Facebook Paper and the Twitter iOS app and both are great posts. I have a feeling this is one to subscribe to.

Great talk from Jay Thrash on using Facebook Origami and Quartz Composer to mock up iOS UI. I’ve been playing with Origami and QC recently and I must admit I have struggled with it. Jay has some great tips on keeping things manageable and also gives some solid examples of how to get started with it.

Business and Marketing

Chris Breen with a great article on how to work with the press. The first few points aren’t super relevant to us app developers but keep on reading as there is some really great advice in the rest of the article.

And finally...

Hey guys, I’ve got an idea for a “new” app…