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Tutorial: Taking an iOS game to Android in 5 minutes
Most developers at some point in their project lifecycle have considered whether to approach the growing number of Android based stores. Making your app Android compatible opens up an enormous new market. Using a real world iOS game, we'll take you step-by-step through rebuilding it for Android using Marmalade Juice, which comes included with the free Marmalade SDK.
madewithmarmalade.com
News
The Wrist Business
Joe Cieplinski with a lengthy piece on his decision process around whether to develop for the Watch on day one. I'm very much of the same opinion as Joe here and while I'm sure we'll see cool apps for the watch, I think the current revenue opportunities are quite limited. This may all change when the full SDK comes, but right now I'm being cautious.
joecieplinski.com
EU VAT Legislation and the App Store
I first linked to this article by Ole Begemann back in July but it's worth looking at again now as the legislation is about to become active. Unfortunately for us developers, the additional VAT will be taken out of existing revenue rather than prices being increased to cope with it. This article by Jas Purewal is also worth reading for more information.
oleb.net
Tools
Speeding Up Custom Script Phases
Fantastic article from Daniel Jalkut with three great tips on speeding up custom build scripts. These scripts can definitely get out of hand on larger projects and so this could save you many minutes (or even hours?) per day.
indiestack.com
Code
Favorite Swift Tips & Tricks of 2014
Swift may only have been around for six months or so but there's more than enough tips and tricks to make this year end roundup article a great read. I'm sure even those developers that jumped in early with Swift will find something here that they didn't know. There's also an old trick I've been using for a while of an alias to delete Xcode derived data but I do like Clay Smith's choice for the command name.
realm.io
Introduction To SceneKit
What a fantastic gentle introduction to SceneKit from Silviu Pop. He goes over some of the core concepts of SceneKit and then presents challenges with solutions to guide you through the learning. There's also Part 2 and Part 3 which cover more advance topics but are again so well written that each challenge just seems like the next logical step.
weheartswift.com
Death to Telescoping Constructors
Writing these telescoping constructors in Objective-C was never something I gave much thought to. It was a good practice I learned early to ensure all your constructors end up going through one method. Tony Arnold points out how much less boiler plate code we have to write to accomplish the same thing in Swift.
tonyarnold.com
HLSpriteKit
Karl Voskuil has open sourced some helpful classes and utilities for working with SpriteKit. There's a class category for using gesture recognizers in a Scene which means you can encapsulate the touch processing into a Node subclass and keep the scene from getting bloated. Worth a look at the background loading of assets in a Scene as well.
github.com
Business and Marketing
How Broken is Discovery on the App Store? This Broken.
Plenty of talk about search on the App Store this week, kicked off with this article from Ged Maheux who showed the truly dismal results of a search for "Twitter". Aleksandar Vacić replied with a post not only about search, but app discovery and Joe Cieplinski suggests that if you're relying on loose search terms, you're doing it wrong.
gedblog.com
You Can Ignore Your Competitors, But Don’t Ignore Their Customers
Stuart Hall with a great little piece on not only paying attention to your customers, or your competitors, but your competitor's customers!
medium.com
Usually I'd be saying that this was the last iOS Dev Weekly of the year, but I'm going to be trying something a little different next week. Not a regular issue but there will be something dropping into your inboxes next Friday. Look out for it!
In the mean time we've had a new beta of Xcode, iOS 8.2 and WatchKit Beta 3. In terms of WatchKit, not a huge amount has changed since Beta 2 (although, @IBAction!) so this could be a sign that the final release will be in January some time?
If you're taking a break next week, have a good one!
Dave Verwer