Issue 133

14^th February 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Step away from your Flappy Bird / Threes mash up, I’m already 90% there with mine. Flappy Threes. It’s going to be huge…

Dave Verwer

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News

So it’s impossible to ignore the Flappy Bird saga that has unfolded this week and of all the articles that were written about it, I liked this one by Jeff Vogel the best. It’s tragic that this affected the author so much (I know I’m probably not helping by talking about it, I was unsure whether to link to anything to do with it to be honest) but I hope that he gets his wish to be left alone in the near future. Luckily, that section of this industry is incredibly fickle and it should die down soon.

On the odd occasion this week that people weren’t talking about Flappy Bird, they were talking about why Apple should replace Objective-C. Guy English put together a great round up of the current instance of this conversation and provides some thoughtful comments about why the discussion is even happening. The only thing I know is that Objective-C isn’t going anywhere until Apple decide that it needs to and it appears that they are favouring improvement of the language over replacement.

Tools

Even with an SSD, launching the iOS Simulator has become frustratingly slow in recent years but fear not, Vadim Shpakovski has a potential solution for you. By setting the location of the DerivedData folder to be on a RAMDisk rather than a physical disk he is seeing significant speed increases in build and run times. This tip has been around for a while now but Vadim puts the process together nicely into something that can be configured very easily.

This isn’t going to be a tool you need every day but if you have ever wanted a deeper look into iOS disassembly then this tool will be right up your street. It has support for Mac and iOS, including arm64 support and unlike most disassemblers it had a great UI for investigating the internals of apps.

Christopher Anderson explains how to get to the extremely detailed diagnostic reports that the Apple geniuses (genii?) have access to by spoofing the ticket number needed to allow the tool to run. Christopher also hints that he is going to be doing more investigation into the results including the possibility of producing some graphs out of the results so this may be one to watch in the future.

Code

In the latest issue of objc.io, Ole Begemann takes a deep look at unicode support in Foundation. We are very lucky that NSString makes it so we rarely have to think about the specifics of it. That said, it’s always good to have an understanding of it and this article has some fascinating details of the history and some of the curious aspects of the standard. After all, wha� are y�u goi�� to d� wh��n it all goes wro��� if you don’t know anything about it?

Custom input views for UITextField and UITextView controls have been possible since iOS 3.2 but they are not something I come across people using very often. Ayaka Nonaka has put together this implementation of a custom calculator input view which should serve as a good reminder that this functionality exists.

Business and Marketing

David Smith on the argument that people who don’t upgrade their OS versions also don’t buy apps. Thankfully, he is able to validate that theory with stats from an app of his by looking at OS versions across his most recent thousand purchases. He sums it up well by saying, “You are excluding some paying customers when you drop OS support, but you are dropping a vanishingly small proportion.”

Martin Palsovic with a detailed look at the early days of the Flappy Bird popularity explosion. It’s fascinating to see how it spread and there are some great tips in here for when you are doing market research on your competition.

And finally...

More ratings prompts = more ratings… right?