Issue 19

9^th December 2011

Written by Dave Verwer

News

Matt Gemmell tells us what we all desperately want to hear :). I tend to support the latest +1 versions of iOS with my stuff (meaning iOS 5 and 4.3 right now) although for brand new apps (like one I just started work on) I will only be supporting iOS 5.

LLVM was included with Xcode 4.2 and the iOS 5 SDK but here are the official release notes. Worth a read through, especially the “What’s New in LLVM 3.0?” section.

Tools

I have been trying not to link to Mike Ash every week (you really should be subscribed!) but I couldn’t let this one pass unnoticed. This week takes a look at otool, nm, otx and class-dump.

Doug Russell with an in-app embedded alternative to last week’s Consuela app for viewing debug logs on device. I think I prefer a separate app for this kind of thing but I wanted to link to it as some people will prefer to do it this way. Hint: The panel in the demo app can be shown with a rotation gesture.

Jouni Miettunen with another on-device log viewer, where did they all come from!

Interesting times in the Objective-C library management space with VendorKit joining CocoaPods in the race to simplify and automate the inclusion of 3rd party code.

Sam Deane with some excellent suggestions for Apple on how Radar could be improved. I hope he filed this blog post as a radar :).

Code

朱建刚 with an implementation of the beautiful Path radial menu control.

More path UI deconstruction from Tim Duckett, this time is the turn of the floating date hint. There is another interesting article by Florian Mielke linked from the end Tim’s post which is also worth reading. Let’s all try and remember that what worked in the Path UI may or may not work in your app though and try to stop this and the radial menu becoming the next pull to refresh.

Jonathan Penn on MKNetworkKit using NSOperation over GCD. Personally I am a big fan of NSOperation and usually find myself reaching for it in preference to GCD as I find it easier to write clean code with concurrent code being well separated into classes. I have often wondered why NSOperation was only converted to be built atop GCD on Mac OS X though? Anyone know why?

Mugunth Kumar’s aforementioned networking library.

Interesting “fix” with iOS 5 to allow case sensitive HTTP headers to be sent without modification. I put the word fix in quotes as HTTP header field named should be case insensitive but this is a nice modification if you are working with an incorrectly implemented API which you do not have control over.

Design

Michael Shephard with a look at the design process that he uses when designing a new icon.

After my brief investigation of the Android UI for Path last week, I came across this blog which is a catalogue of exceptional UI design for Android. Always interesting to check out a different perspective.

I am afraid I am still tied to Photoshop for this kind of thing but Acorn is a great (and sensibly priced, unlike Photoshop) image editor. Gus Mueller, the author of Acorn has written a walkthrough of using it to create some UI elements.

And finally...

Amen! The likelihood of me linking to you in this email goes up significantly if I can easily find your name on your site.