Issue 140

Comment

The WWDC ticket process sprang to life yesterday and instead of the usual method of securing a ticket, this year is going to be a lottery. WWDC is going to be the 2nd - 6th June and you have until 10am PDT on Monday, April 7th to register for your chance to buy a ticket. Even better, there will be no agonising wait to see if you have been chosen as the results will be announced later that same day. Much more sensible than in previous years!

I wish you all good luck in getting one and hope to see you there.

News

System-Wide Custom Fonts on iOS

Clever use of the enterprise profiles feature of iOS to allow any compatible font to be installed onto your iOS devices. This is a good reason to start enumerating fonts in your apps instead of offering a predefined list. iWork picks up these fonts already so Keynote will finally have compatibility with the presentations I write!

Apps vs Mobile Web Usage

I always assumed that as a developer I was biased in my usage of apps vs mobile web but these graphs from Flurry show they still hold an overwhelming lead over web usage on phones. I would really like to see these statistics split out over iOS and Android separately, I have a feeling the numbers would swing even further if this was iOS only. Also, we spend an average of 2 hours 42 minutes a day on our devices, wow.

Tools

How I Evaluate Third-Party Dependencies

"With as few third-party dependencies as possible." is the short answer from Justin Williams and I couldn't agree more. I have skirted around this issue a few times on iOS Dev Weekly and Justin manages to sum up my feelings on it in one sentence. The only place I would disagree with this is on his first point about how much code there is in the dependency. I don't reject dependencies for only having a single class or category, in fact I prefer those as they are not going to have far reaching implications unlike larger dependencies. Great article.

Dynamic Linking on iOS

Damien DeVille with an investigation into dynamic libraries on iOS. Dynamic linking has always been disallowed on iOS but it's a policy decision rather than a technical restriction. Damien gives a good walk through of the details and then attempts to get one running on device. Does he succeed? I'll leave that for the article...

Selectively ignoring Objective-C exceptions

I missed this post when it was published but this is a great tip from Jack Chen to selectively ignore specific exception types on an exception breakpoint.

Code

BRFlabbyTable

No, not flappy, flabby. This is an unusual (but interesting) visual effect from Julien Ducret. Check out the two videos to get a sense of the effect. I can't see this kind of effect being widely useful but it's worth checking out. The implementation is surprisingly simple too.

YLGIFImage

With iWork on iOS getting animated GIF support this week, you don't want to fall behind with implementing this year's hot feature. Li Yong has you covered though with these UIImage and UIImageView subclasses that will animate all the things. You will also want to check out OLImageView which inspired this project and allows progressive downloads of GIF files, but at the expense of not quite being as efficient on memory.

macOS Development

QuickTime Banned From Mac App Store

Michael Tsai sums up the details of Drew McCormack's recent rejection for using QTKit in an app. It seems really soon to start rejecting apps that use an API that was deprecated less than 6 months ago and this causes big problems for anyone wanting to continue to support 10.8 as well as 10.9.

Design

Whatever’s Best For The People, That’s What We Do

Julie Zhuo on the recent changes to the Facebook news feed. This story isn't specific to iOS but it highlights something that we are all guilty of from time to time. As developers, we like to have the best equipment and tools available, and that becomes our default testing hardware. The rest of the world isn't like us (in so many ways 😄) and this story should serve as a nice reminder that we should pull out that iPhone 4 for a few days every now and again.

Business and Marketing

A Statistical Analysis of the Apple App Store

Colin Eberhardt with more charts and graphs about the App Store than you could ever need. One statistic stuck out for me in the opening paragraph of this article, 60% of apps have no reviews. There has been a lot of talk about how important reviews are recently, and even more talk about the right way to ask for them. However if that statistic doesn't show that there is a problem with a lack of reviews, I don't know what does.

Videos

Practical Asynchronous Programming

Chris Eidhof with a collection of tips and tricks on asynchronous programming from Cocoaheads Kiev recently. Part two of the talk is also online here.

And finally...

Implementing Plausible Crash Recovery

Rarely has an April Fools' day joke had such technical merit.

Issue 140 April 4th 2014