Issue 196

1^st May 2015

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Big week! Apple watches on wrists everywhere, App Store Analytics in iTunes Connect is starting to roll out (for real this time, I promise! 😝) and Objective-C can now be compiled and simulated in Visual Studio on Windows 😱. I keep looking out of the window to see if the skies are falling but we seem to be OK for now so let’s get on with the links!

Dave Verwer

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News

Finally! 😎 Emails started popping up yesterday inviting people to apply for beta access to iTunes Connect Analytics. It seems like the requests for access started to get processed pretty quickly but there are still plenty of people in the queue awaiting access. What’s a couple more days after this long though, eh? 😏 Karen Biscopink looks over what’s in this first version.

There have been many misleading articles this week regarding how many apps are affected by the certificate pinning bug in AFNetworking v2.5.1. There’s no clearer source than from the maintainers themselves and you should read this even if you aren’t using AFNetworking. The response gives the entire story without the sensational headlines.

Tools

Jared Sinclair back again this week with a follow up to last week’s code signing article. This time he tackles code signing and the watch.

Code

Now that the initial news about the release of ResearchKit has largely calmed down it’s been interesting to see what kind of work is going on there. One of the key things people are adding is support for new task types. Vincent Tourraine goes into detail in this article on how to build one.

Now that we’re starting to get real hardware installed on our wrists we’re able to see how watch apps behave in the real world. Given the way that WatchKit works at the moment it’s not surprising there is lag but is there anything we can do to help keep it minimal? David Smith takes a look.

Soroush Khanlou presents two great ways to handle that case where your table cell is getting out of hand and contains more logic than a UIView subclass should. As Soroush mentions, this can apply in other cases like collection views as well. Nice idea that still holds true to the MVC pattern.

Mike Swanson with a very comprehensive set of hints and tips on developing for the watch.

Design

Everyone’s favourite mobile design inspiration site has just added a new category of screenshots for the watch. That’s all I really have to say, right? 😀 Off you go…

Joshua Porter with a great story of how a little up front research on whether a feature was really needed in an app saved a lot of development time. It may seem obvious but jumping into code is just so tempting that we sometimes need a reminder not to rush in 😧.

Business and Marketing

Nik Fletcher with a useful tip if you want to direct people to exactly the right place. These links (which only work on device, of course) bypass the App Store app and instead load the store page in the Apple Watch app.

Should you include a device frame in your screenshots? Should you annotate them? There was once a time when these things were specifically advised against in the iTunes Connect documentation, but these days the rules have been relaxed. Stuart Hall looks into what the most popular apps are doing in terms of screenshots.

Videos

Fancy catching up with some of last year’s WWDC videos before we get bombarded again in a few weeks? Guilherme Rambo has put together this neat little app which currently allows streaming or downloading last year’s videos (but presumably will be updated when the new ones start to come online).

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And finally...

Looks like Simon Whitaker is working on something new! Can’t wait 😀