Issue 16

18^th November 2011

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Friday everyone!

News

I know that since the iOS SDK appeared it’s the first time in my career that I have been able to tell people what I do and actually have them not only understand it but actually get excited about it.

As Keith notes, the Stanford iOS development iTunesU feed is worth subscribing to even if you already know iOS development as they usually have some excellent guest speakers throughout the course.

Tools

Interesting idea from Florent Pillet for a richer logging framework supporting for iOS including a real time desktop log viewer app. I must admit logging of images would come in very handy.

Super simple tip from Marc Charbonneau showing how to replace the simulator’s contacts database with a real one from a device.

Code

Peter Steinberger has created a very cool implementation of the media manipulation interactions used in the push pop press Our Choice app. Lovely stuff.

Apple has published a tech note with more details on the extended attribute for protecting cached files that are not backed up on iOS 5.0.1. Seems this has changed since iOS 5.0 so you will want to read this one carefully if it affects you.

Video of a presentation from earlier this year by Stewart Gleadow on automated UI testing using Frank.

I do love that CI was included in iOS 5, Jacob Gundersen takes a look at the basics.

Design

I have always been a fan of a simple sketch rather than any of the huge array of available prototyping tools. UXPin might end up being the middle ground between the two by using paper and sticky notes to lay out iOS UI elements which are emailed, recognised and then converted to an editable prototype.

An alternative to above if you prefer the high fidelity look for your mockups.

Jiva DeVoe notices that tapping just to the left of the 6 glyph on the iPad split keyboard will actually give you a 5, super cool. I can’t think of any other platform (even Mac OS X) where this much care has been taken with user interaction.