Issue 141

11^th April 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So WWDC tickets came and went, I was hoping for the email that began with “Congratulations” but ended up with the email subject that flatly said “Your WWDC Ticket Status”. I’m still going to be in San Francisco for the week as there are many other reasons to be in the city while WWDC happens so I may still see you there, even if you only get to wave at me through the Moscone glass… 😢

I do still have a little hope of a WWDC ticket, one of the other members of my development team was one of the chosen few and has very kindly agreed to transfer his ticket… fingers crossed.

Dave Verwer

News

How to add a brain to your smart phone

This is super cool. Pete Warden talks about a new open source library which uses neural networking to detect arbitrary items in an image/video stream. I remember back to my university days from my AI course, neural networks seemed like they were on the edge of greatness (this was in 1995/6) and in many ways it seems they never quite tipped over that edge. This is cool though 😄.

Free-to-play games don’t have to suck

I’ve recently been talking about Hearthstone quite a lot as a perfect example of a free to play game which doesn’t suck. It’s Blizzard’s first crack at the iOS platform (or any mobile platform) and so of course it’s very polished but the key thing is that the free to play aspect of the game doesn’t get in the way of the fun at all. Let’s hope that this approach is successful and turns the tide in terms of free to play.

Tools

Clean up your projects with Xcode 5

Great set of tips from Tony Arnold on taking advantage of the new goodies in Xcode 5. I was aware of @import but I hadn’t considered for a second that once you use them you can simply delete the “Frameworks” group completely. Consider my mind blown Tony.

Polychromatic

Kolin Krewinkel with a take on syntax highlighting that I haven’t seen anywhere before, let alone just in Xcode. This Xcode plugin doesn’t highlight based on syntax type but instead takes a much more granular (and arguably more useful) approach and colours individual properties and variables with unique colours so they are easier to spot. I can see this being extended to method names as well but this is already something worth taking a look at.

Code

The builder pattern in Objective-C

Klaas Pieter Annema with some lessons learned from writing Java code recently. He looks at the builder pattern but takes a more Objective-C way of implementing it than a pure copy. I can see value in this for objects like NSDate and NSURL where a mutable type doesn’t exist and it turns out Joris Kluivers has us covered for that. Uli Kusterer also has a few things to say on the subject as well.

1Password and iOS apps

As good designers and developers I am sure we always strive to sweat the details on our apps and this type of feature stands out as exactly one of those details that no one will notice until they need it, and then you make their day by implementing it. Yes, this is for a specific app (the wonderful 1Password in this case) but this technique is not necessarily specific to that app. If you want a list of apps which might support URLs in this way then x-callback-url is a good place to start.

Exposing NSDictionary

Bartosz Ciechanowski with a fantastically detailed look into the internals of NSDictionary and friends. You will also want to check out his article Exposing NSMutableArray from last month as well.

Design

Side Drawer Navigation Could Cost Half Your User Engagement

Anthony Rose on the curse of the hamburger menu and like every good question, the answer comes down to “It depends”. I can see that in the case for Zeebox here it’s making critical content difficult to find. I think the side drawer is a red herring here though, I don’t think it’s anything to to with the drawer itself but how you guide people to the most important content/features of your app. It depends…

Business and Marketing

The Right Way to Ask Users for iOS Permissions

Brenden Mulligan on the tricky subject of asking for permissions in iOS apps. With a huge number of apps abusing push notifications these days (games and magazines being the worst offenders in my experience) it’s getting harder to encourage people to click that Allow button, no matter how noble your intentions. This is something I’ve been thinking about (and working on) recently as well.

Data Analytics That Matter

Analytics gets a lot of stick these days and like Justin Williams, I don’t really see a problem with the concept. In fact, with most reputable providers it’s quite difficult to do it wrong and the insights into how people are using your app are certainly useful for improving the user experience and isn’t that what we all strive for? Just try to keep it underneath the creepy line.

Videos

Upgrade Discounts on the Mac App Store

Ken Case talking at the Seattle Xcoders meeting from earlier this year about all aspects of upgrade pricing. The talk focuses on the Mac App Store specifically but much of it is relevant in a wider context of App Store pricing in general. John Chaffee also talked at the same meeting about the Mac App Store which is worth checking out as well.

And finally...

Due to an underlying implementation detail...

I don’t know about you but I have no idea. No ticket or beer for me at WWDC…