Issue 147

23^rd May 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Just over one week to go… As usual, it’s close enough to show time that I’ve included some links to various WWDC related posts. If you’re going to be there, please do say hello! I’m lucky enough to have a ticket again this year so I’ll mostly be inside Moscone during the week but I’ll be at all sorts of other events as well so I hope to see you either inside the conference or out and about in San Francisco!

Dave Verwer

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News

No more pull requests for merging CocoaPods into the master Specs repository? Sounds good to me. Interesting history behind why this wasn’t part of the original idea for CocoaPods and what looks like a solid solution to the problem. If you maintain a CocoaPod then you need to read this post and the getting started guide, then claim your existing pods.

WWDC

Rob Elkin being interviewed by Chuck Joiner about AltConf. Yet again, the Alt organisers have put on an incredible show which easily rivals any other iOS/Mac conference you might attend, all for free. If you’re in San Francisco during WWDC but don’t have a ticket then this is where you should be. Tickets are still available but thousands have already been sold and entry is on a first come, first served basis so I expect the AltConf queue to rival the main WWDC keynote queue this year 😎.

They cut it a little fine with the release date for the redesign of this site but this remains the definitive place to plan your week’s activities which don’t occur inside Moscone. Honorable mention goes to Orta’s WWDC party list which filled in the gap before the relaunch of this site.

Are you attending? If so, add your name to Adam Swinden’s list and join up on the Glassboard.

Tools

This is a huge update to PaintCode. I bought a license for the original version but ended up not actually using it very much outside of easily mapping and visualising animation paths. The idea was great but it always felt just a little too much work to get the generated code to be a usable thing and I would fall back to Sketch or Photoshop. Version 2 looks to comprehensively fix that problem with StyleKits which auto export created artwork directly into Xcode (after a little one time configuration). Great update.

Want to find all live instances of a class at runtime while debugging? Richard Heard has put together this small library that will allow you to do exactly that. It compiles into your app but is mostly useful from within LLDB for live investigation of objects. Also, this is the best named project I’ve seen in a while.

Update: Thanks to Krzysztof Zabłocki for pointing out that this code seems to have been taken from another project, Cycript by Jay Freeman. While the code remains useful, the disregard for the original code license is not good enough. Apologies, I would not have linked to it if I had noticed this.

Code

Alberto De Bortoli takes a look at implementing the actor pattern in Objective-C. I have always liked the idea of actor models but they feel like overkill for simple threading cases. This article and the associated GitHub repository provide a really simple starting point for implementation though.

Mattt Thompson bringing more hidden Objective-C gems out of hiding. This time it’s the turn of dispatch_benchmark to step into the spotlight, a private method included in libdispatch.

Design

Writing great copy in your apps is a tricky subject. People working on the design of an app often think very carefully about prominent wording on the screens that are being explicitly designed but what about all those other places. Error messages spring to mind as the most obvious place where developers have to quickly write copy but there are many opportunities to improve our apps through better copy writing. John Zeratsky has some good advice.

Inspired by last week’s release of the HIG on iBooks Mark Wilson has extracted a few practical tips from it. Now, you’ve all read this in detail, right? RIGHT? So you don’t need this article, right? I’ll know if you haven’t read it by how many clicks this link gets though. You should all be ashamed. 😉

Business and Marketing

David Smith with a wonderful article on the sliding scale between inspiration and flat out copying. This is a tricky subject but this post sums things up extremely well. The example of Flappy Golf is a great one here, clearly inspired in both concept, art style and even name but it couldn’t be called a copy in any way (it’s actually a really good game too). Great article.

Like a payday loan for iOS developers, by proving your sales through iTunes Connect reports Pollen will advance you the cash for reinvestment without you having to wait the ~60 days for Apple to make payment. The key thing here is that the service also comes with advice on the most valuable use of that money. Great idea.

Sponsored Jobs

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We are building a platform to automatically track your golf game on the course. Arccos is at the center of exciting trends in technology: mobile, quantified self, and connected devices. We’re looking for an exceptional iOS developer to join us in creating the product the world of golf doesn’t know is possible but won’t be able to live without.

And finally...

Amazing ingenuity… I can’t believe this works.