Issue 162

Comment

4 days to go until the big announcement(s) and we've been told they will be live streamed again, great news! We also had the (final?) beta of Xcode 6 land in our laps and with it came... no significant language changes to Swift.

It's almost time. Are your apps ready to be submitted?

News

Common App Rejections

What are the most common reasons for apps being rejected? Well, the last time we had any data on this back in 2010 where Steve Jobs listed the top 3 reasons on stage during the WWDC keynote. At the time they were apps that didn't function as described, apps using private APIs and finally apps that crashed. Want to know what the up to date reasons are? Here you go.

App Store Review Guidelines Updated to Consider New iOS 8 Features

More preparations for the iOS 8 release here with the review guidelines being updated. Obviously they have been updated to cover things like custom keyboards, HomeKit and HealthKit. However there was also an update to one of the broad bullet point rules at the top of the document saying "if your app is plain creepy, it may not be accepted".

Tools

Form

Close your eyes and imagine Quartz Composer, specifically for designing iOS apps (yes, a little like Origami) with live device updates and without the crushing performance issues that QC has. Open your eyes, here it is 😜. I got a demo of this at WWDC from Max Weisel and it absolutely blew me away. I think this is going to be a really significant tool in iOS design.

The Terminal

Craig Hockenberry with the best set of Terminal tips I've ever seen. I'm not even going to write much more here as it might delay you from clicking through and reading this from end to end, twice. If you do any kind of development on a Mac, you need to read this.

Code

Web Services, Dependencies, and CloudKit

I think many people have a concern with CloudKit that once data is in there, they are making a pretty serious commitment to it. Not only is data difficult to extract from it but also you are certainly going to be out of luck if you want to look even slightly away from the Mac and iOS platforms. No web apps, certainly no Android. Tim Schmitz has some food for thought if you're considering using CloudKit.

Tuples, Structs and Enums

Chris Eidhof with a very clear and readable post on Tuples, Structs and Enums in Swift. On the same subject, Apple also wrote this article on their official blog, and included a great documentation playground along with it.

Flow Controllers on iOS for a Better Navigation Control

Alberto De Bortoli experimenting with flow controllers. The basic idea is that a view controller shouldn't present another view controller, instead leaving that job to the flow controller who's only job is presentation. It's an interesting idea and certainly worth a read.

Design

Bye, Google Maps.

Fantastic article by Zach Hamed taking a look at usability in both Citymapper and Google Maps. Both apps are very similar in their functionality but the slight differences in design make all the difference to how long it takes to get those common tasks done. I really love posts like this.

Business and Marketing

App Bundles

With the release of the new iTunes Connect today, I know my mind turned to all of the other goodies that were announced like analytics, app bundles and promo videos. Jenny H and Joe Cieplinski take a good look at app bundles in this post. There's also a few hints that Testflight is in the process of going live but the app isn't showing up in the store for me. I'm sure it will go fully live as soon as I hit send on this issue ⏰.

Let’s Make a Promo Video

The best way to get someone to buy your app is to write a great post about how you made the promo video... Discuss. I know I bought Beatwave after reading this post 👏. Seriously though, this is a fantastic post about creating great videos for your app.

And finally...

If programming languages were weapons

Very funny. No mention of Swift or Objective-C unfortunately but tweet me with your suggestions and I'll retweet the best...

Issue 162 September 5th 2014