Issue 143

25^th April 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Get access to beta seeds of OS X, for free and without requiring a developer account. This programme technically states that this is an “OS X Mavericks Beta” but it’s likely that this is in preparation for the beta of OS X 10.10. This is OS X only for the moment but if a similar scheme is ever rolled out for iOS betas then those three months between WWDC and the launch are going to be even more challenging in terms of app reviews and tech support issues.

As we are only five weeks away from WWDC, it’s probably time to start speculating on iOS 8. Federico Viticci provides an in-depth look at his wishes for the new version. There’s nothing too crazy listed here as he is predicting that iOS 8 will be more of a Snow Leopard in terms of incremental updates to stability, performance and user interface. He does include my one major wish for iOS 8 though, better app to app communication.

Tools

As much as we all love the App Store, we don’t all feel the same level of love for iTunes Connect. Jack is a new app which uses the iTunes Connect Transporter utility which was released last year to allow local, offline editing and uploading of app metadata. Looks good.

Code

If you didn’t get the memo that TDD is dead 😃 this week then you might want to check out this well written piece by Gordon Fontenot. Adopting TDD in any environment has challenges but that’s especially true for Objective-C development as our tools in this area have always lagged a little. It’s also worth noting that unlike many articles that cover TDD, Gordon includes testing around UI components here as well (specifically a UITableViewCell).

Many async frameworks are full of promises about how they will make your life easier (pun intended 😉). Max Howell has recently released PromiseKit and it looks to be a comprehensive and well documented library with some really intriguing concepts included.

Alek Åström with an interesting take on scroll views fetching and reloading data as the scroll position nears the end of the list. Incrementally fetching data is a very common technique but it’s true that it does break the functionality of the scroll indicator slightly. Obviously this technique wouldn’t work for “infinite” scrollers like Twitter timeline views, but where you have a finite data set there are some tips in here you might want to look at.

macOS Development

I guess it’s also time to start speculating on what might happen to OS X as well when WWDC rolls around. Rumours are rife that there might be a new look for the desktop in the works and I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if they turn out to be true. If there is a new UI, I agree with Craig Hockenberry that Helvetica Neue is likely to become the default system font. Check what your apps would look like with this category to replace the system font.

Design

This is a great idea by Jared Sinclair. Take an app (with the author’s blessing of course) and write an in depth critique of the UI design. Glassboard is first under the microscope but I would imagine this is going to be something to keep an eye on. His queue may be fairly full already but if you think your app could benefit then you can request a review here.

Business and Marketing

Google Play added the ability for developers to be able to respond to app reviews a year or so ago and now Microsoft are experimenting with the same functionality. From a quick look at the Google Play store this feature either isn’t very widely used, or the replies from developers are not being made particularly visible as I couldn’t spot a single response in reviews of the top selling apps. There must be a way to allow us to talk to our customers better though as there is definitely still a lot of pain being felt by developers.

David Smith has been detailing his thoughts on how to improve the App Store in a five part podcast (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) recently and now that the discussion on the podcast is wrapped up he has summarised his thoughts in this blog post. His conclusions are mainly focused on improving transparency around freemium apps but there are some broader points included as well.

Videos

This 90 minute talk and panel Q&A session delivered by some of the Facebook engineers behind Facebook Paper gives some insight into some of the techniques used to get such incredibly silky smooth UI performance and you might be surprised at the lengths they went to in order to get there.

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And finally...

This needs to be standard, now.