Interesting little tool from Nigel Timothy Barber that takes a PDF file and spits out Core Graphics code to render the output into a context. Depending on the complexity of the PDF the source files can be (necessarily) large. For example, I managed to generate a 25Mb source file when I tried to give it a challenge. It still rendered perfectly into my app though.
With iOS 8 came a change to how AutoLayout treats views with transformations applied to them. Transformations and iOS 7 Auto Layout were almost the end of me several times so I’m a fan of the changes, but you’ll still run into issues if you maintain support for iOS 7 as well. Vlas Voloshin has an investigation into the problem and information on how to keep everything running smoothly on both iOS versions.
Mike Swanson follows up his general WatchKit tips article from a couple of weeks ago with some more tips for working with images on the watch. I can’t imagine a WatchKit app without images in it so you’ll probably want to give this post a look as well.
I tend not to use a logging framework myself but I know that many of you are! So, if you’re a fan of something like CocoaLumberjack then this Swift logging library will probably be of interest.
If you’re shipping OS X software outside the App Store, it’s likely that you use Sparkle to auto-update it. Sparkle can also send anonymous system information along with the request. Kuba Suder has put together a small Rails project which you can use to host your feed and produce really pretty graphs of the update data being reported.
Marco Arment with a post on the iteration of his watch companion app for Overcast. The first version for the watch attempted to mirror the structure of the iPhone app, but after using it on a real watch realised it was the wrong approach. He redesigned the entire app to get a better experience on the watch, as well as better launch times due to the simplification. In many ways this is a similar story to the post about designing Twitterrific for the watch I linked to a few weeks back.
Another issue of obj.io came along this week and this month time the topic is Audio. As always, you should read the whole issue but I really enjoyed this set of guidelines from Aaron Day on how to effectively use audio without annoying your users.
As you may remember, I’m a big fan of perfect status bars in App Store screenshots 😀 but until now there was no easy way to add one to a watch screenshot. Luckily this tool now exists and can remove the charging indicator, add the standard time of 10:09 and generally make your screenshots look more professional. It supports apps, glances and notifications (with some limitations). Great work 👍.
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Really great talk by Daniel Steinberg from dotSwift this year.