Issue 18

2^nd December 2011

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

How is it already Friday again! Oh and if you enjoy these emails then it would be really appreciated if you would pass on a link or this email to someone else who might enjoy it so I can play my little game of watching subscribers increase. ;)

Dave Verwer

News

Marco Arment with a look at the latest device, carrier and iOS version number stats from Instapaper. Looks like iOS 5 is growing steadily but I agree with him that at 50% it seems too early to require it right now.

Sounds like it isn’t doing anything too concerning on iOS and can be easily disabled but it is worth knowing that it exists. However I hope this doesn’t lead to the masses turning off the diagnostics as that setting is also used to send crash reports to iTunes connect for us to see.

Apple quickly responded to the claims above and said that it was no longer used in “most” of their products with iOS 5.

The first version of Cocos 2D to use OpenGL ES 2.0 and as a result it loses compatibility with 2G and 3G phones but I think that is a very reasonable requirement these days.

Tools

Brent Simmons on “Go to line” functionality in text editor apps (not just programmers editors, but things like Mail as well) on the Mac. Oh and check out the bonus link in his last paragraph as well for more musing on text editing.

Quick and easy access to on device logs for you and your beta testers, useful.

A simple, step by step tutorial by Kurry Tran taking you through the basics of iOS 5 storyboards if you are new to iOS development.

Code

ARC compatible, iOS 5 specific grid view implementation by Gulam Moledina. I think there are enough of these now that Apple should seriously think about creating their own or extending UITableView to support multiple cells per row. Until that happens, this looks like the best 3rd party implementation I have seen so far.

Sam Vermette with a HUD component for indicating hardware changes. As he says in the release notes, Apple uses this type of UI specifically for hardware notifications (volume, keyboard, etc…) and you should too. If you need a more general purpose progress HUD then he also created SVProgressHUD.

Just in case you hadn’t come across it before, the aforementioned SVProgressHUD.

An active record implementation which sits on top of Core Data modeled on the Rails implementation of active record. Core data can be pretty verbose at times so this might be worth a look.

Design

Geoff Teehan with some great analysis of Path v2 which was released this week. I think the new Path UI has just the perfect amount of custom to it but I especially love the clock/time display on the scrollbar as an alternative to having the time information displayed against each post.

Oliver Drobnik with a nice round up of iOS focused UI design pattern sites, I have linked to several of these over previous weeks but there are some here that I had not come across. I especially like “Beautiful Pixels”.

Business and Marketing

Oliver Reichenstein, creator of iA writer on the interesting observation of consistent revenue for an app regardless of varying the price point up and down. I have seen others talk about this and it is a fascinating phenomenon. Also, if you haven’t used iA writer before, it is absolutely my text editor of choice for markdown or if I have anything lengthy to write.

I really don’t want to bash Android in this email but when investigating to see if I could get a glimpse of the Path UI for Android yesterday I was immediately struck by the negative reviews left on the marketplace being primarily related to different screen sizes/device incompatibilities and other issues seemingly unrelated to the app itself. We are no strangers to crazy 1★ reviews on the app store but it made me even more glad that iOS is my mobile development platform of choice.

And finally...

Not iOS related but the Doom 3 source was released this week and Fabien Sanglard took a look at building it with Xcode 4. I am very much looking forward to his forthcoming code review.