Issue 20

16^th December 2011

Written by Dave Verwer

News

Brent Simmons with a follow up to Dave Winer’s “Why apps are not the future” post this week.

Both Parse and StackMob are moving very quickly which isn’t surprising with the 800 lb iCloud in the room. If you haven’t checked out StackMob yet then they opened up to the public this week.

Tools

Overall I am a big fan of storyboarding in iOS 5 but there are certainly some issues that need addressing. Jonathan Wight talks frankly about the problems that he encountered using storyboards for a large app.

A quick refresher on the power of custom build actions, I keep meaning to blog about a custom build script that I use to swap out settings bundles for Debug and Release builds but if you haven’t used them before this is a nice overview of the feature.

Code

I am not a big fan of using/abusing UIAlertView for text and login input but if you choose to use it for that, Keith Harrison has a look at the changes in iOS 5 that mean that at least you don’t have to go hacking at the view hierarchy any more.

Rodrigo Sieiro with a small extension to MKNetworkKit (which I linked to last week) to allow easier OAuth authentication. Anything that makes OAuth easier is surely a good thing.

The new Twitter APIs in iOS are iOS 5 specific, but if you are not quite ready to make that commitment with your app then you might want to check out this library which provides look alike Twitter sheet functionality on iOS 4+.

Johann Döwa links to a couple of open source rotary controls for iOS. I like the look of the one from Domestic Cat software, pretty.