Issue 174

28^th November 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

If you’re celebrating it, Happy Thanksgiving! If not then Happy Friday as always! Don’t forget to read your weekly dose of iOS news in between fighting for that new TV or PlayStation 😬.

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News

As we get towards the end of the year, Orta Therox has taken the time to round up some stats and commentary on the state of CocoaPods. My thanks go out, not only to the CocoaPods team, but to everyone who contributes their time, code and passion to this wonderful community we have here. Aren’t we all lucky.

Ole Begemann with a fascinating experiment on how the iPhone 6 Plus 3x downscaling actually looks when it’s displayed on the 1920x1080 pixel screen. As it’s not possible to get a screenshot of the end result from either the simulator or the device itself, this experiment was performed with a high quality camera and tripod rather than software. Definitely worth a read.

Tools

Here’s an interesting project. Carthage is a dependency manager for iOS (8 only, it needs support for frameworks) and Mac projects. Obviously there are similarities between this and CocoaPods but Carthage takes a slightly less hands on approach to the problem with no need to use an xcworkspace file and a decentralised approach (no specs repository). It’s early days but you’ll definitely want to check this out.

One challenging piece of Watch development is going to be animations. With no support for animation on the watch outside of flip book style image sequences, apps are either going to be static or need to generate hundreds of images to achieve animation. Given that restriction, this tool from James Frost will certainly come in handy. Prototype your animations on the phone and then attach Flipbook to a UIView and have it generate the images for you.

Code

Lots of you clicked through to AsyncDisplayKit when I linked it a few weeks ago but how many of you have started to put something together with it? René Cacheaux may have the kick start you need with this in depth tutorial.

Gabriel Theodoropoulos with a thorough post on building an app which takes advantage of Handoff. I’ve been loving the integration built into the standard iOS 8 and Yosemite apps but the only apps I’ve come across taking advantage of it so far are Pcalc and iA Writer Pro. I can’t wait to see more apps support it though!

Tom Harrington with a post covering the details of sharing data between iOS apps and their extensions. There’s also a great sample project to go along with the app covering both Today and Share extensions.

Design

Ralph Thomas with a fabulously in depth article on animation along with interactive, adjustable examples. You really shouldn’t miss this one, it’s amazing.

I really liked this article by Ian Storm Taylor on why pure black is to be avoided when designing. Like so many of these design techniques, it’s obvious as soon as you see it.

Business and Marketing

This article from Kait Gaiss digs into the stats from Pocket about how much people are reading on various different devices. I know I’ve found myself doing much more reading on my iPhone since having the 6 Plus. I wonder how this will affect app design and even the types of apps available for the iPhone over time?

Videos

The first CocoaLove conference was recently held in October and by all accounts it was a great success. If, like me, you couldn’t make it they’ve been kind enough to start making the videos available. The full set is not quite there yet but there are six great talks already to get you started.

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And finally...

An OS X icon may (barely) fit on the screen but I’m not sure it would fit in the 128k of memory 😧.