Issue 135

28^th February 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Is everyone patched already? If not, goto fail; If you have, also goto fail; … I’m here all week, try the fish…

The truth is that security is hard, everyone makes mistakes and new challenges appear every day but I do believe that Apple have user’s best interests at heart and I wouldn’t be on any other mobile platform, despite this week.

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News

I’m sure no one could have missed the news that Apple purchased the company behind Testflight this week. It will be fascinating to see what they do with this acquisition (and how quickly they move with it. Hint: Probably not very quickly). I am sure we are all hoping for deep and far reaching changes to the ad hoc workflow. Fingers crossed.

Maybe it’s slightly ironic that this white paper was published this week or maybe it’s the best timing possible knowing that a timely release of this document will certainly get some attention. Either way, this detailed white paper from Apple contains an overview of the security features of iOS and while you’ll not find any code in here it does have great explanations of concepts like File Data Protection.

Tools

I was sure I had linked to this in the past but it turns out I haven’t. Snippet Edit is a useful little tool which can edit (and even disable) the default Xcode snippets. Now all we need is a way to make the Assistant Editor insert IBAction methods with the opening brace on a newline. Can someone at Apple make that a priority for Xcode 6 please?

How many of us can say we correctly and fully attribute every piece of open source code we use in our projects? It’s easy to forget to do this but not only is it the right thing to do, it’s a legal requirement. Luckily, if you’re using CocoaPods it helps you in two very important ways. First of all, no code is accepted as a CocoaPod without a valid license being attached and secondly it will generate you full attribution and license details on every build, it even uses a format which can be trivially integrated into your settings bundle. Jeremy Sherman has more details.

I mentioned StoryboardLint last week which flags string mismatches in storyboards as compiler errors. This week Jim Puls takes a slightly different approach to the problem with a set of command line tools for generating code for image asset names, colours and storyboard identifiers. The ideal (and seemingly obvious?) answer to this in my eyes is “simply” to add the ability for Interface Builder to recognise constants in string fields as well as allowing direct entry of strings but until that happens we at least have safety nets in these tools.

Code

Facebook are pushing out all sorts of great open source code recently and this KVO assistant class is no exception. The biggest benefit by far is block based observer callbacks but it also removes the requirement to explicitly remove observers and various other performance and safety features. Looks good.

Rocir Santiago with a look at one of the less used pieces of the Foundation networking puzzle. NSURLProtocol allows you to do all sorts of cool things like completely redirecting all network requests within your app. Even if it’s unlikely that you’ll use this every day, it’s an interesting subject and well explained by Rocir.

Cool…

Design

I’ve linked to the Pixel Perfect Precision Handbook before but this week saw the latest release of it from Matt Gypps and ustwo. It was always an excellent read but this version adds a whole load of extra content and tweaks to the existing pixel perfect goodness. Essential reading.

This interview with Marcos Weskamp, Head of Design at Flipboard is definitely worth a look. It’s obvious from the product that the Flipboard team is driven by design first and foremost and Marcos talks about how that works along with the realities (and restrictions) of working on the design team of a product with a large user base like Flipboard.

Business and Marketing

John Gruber linked to the Threes update notes which suggested that nicely asking for a review in the release notes of your app would be a much more tolerable solution to the problem of getting ratings than an alert view. Oisin Prendiville and Padraig Kennedy back up the idea with figures though and show that this seems to be working for them. What have you got to lose?

And finally...

Cruel, but funny…