Issue 23

6^th January 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy New Year everyone!

Dave Verwer

News

I am sure you have all seen this already but I am including it here just in case you live under a rock. Anthony Herron and Aaron Wardle built a small site to notify you by SMS when WWDC tickets go on sale this year. I am not sure if this makes the situation better or worse in terms of everyone’s chances of actually getting a ticket so I will still wish you all good luck as long as you all try after I get mine.

Aral Balkan has published the full set of session videos to YouTube from the Update conference which happened in Brighton last September.

Interesting post by Dave Addey which seems to show a bug with text entry on the iPad. Key presses shown clearly as registering on the on screen keyboard are missed from the text displayed by Pages.

Tools

Martin Pilkington with an extensive list of bugs, enhancements and niggles with the current release of Xcode (along with Radar numbers, naturally). You probably won’t agree with all of them but there are certainly some good issues here which need fixing and if you agree, don’t forget to dupe them in radar (especially rdar://10511053).

Nick Bradbury reminds us all to occasionally test how users in the real world interact with the network access in our apps. It is all too easy to fall into the nice warm embraces of the always on Wi-Fi while developing and testing our apps.

Fraser Hess on getting readable and unique build numbers/names out of a git repository. I especially like the idea of using —dirty to show when you had uncommitted changes pending when the build occurred.

Working with OpenGL ES 2.0 shaders, you might want to check this out. It allows on device editing and previewing of vertex and fragment shaders. Who said the iPad was only for content consumption?

Code

Sometimes a picture really does say a thousand words.

Mike Nachbaur with a good introductory post if you are just getting started with Core Graphics and he is right, it really isn’t that scary.

I came across Scott Stevenson’s Cocoa Style guide again this week and even though this two part article is far from new it is still very much worth reading if you are new to the language or unsure about best practices. Session 138, “API Design for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch” from the WWDC 2010 session videos is an excellent follow up to this article too.

Business and Marketing

Ole Begemann with a reminder that you should pick the required device capabilities very carefully when submitting the first version of your app as they can not be changed. I am not sure how changing required device capabilities is very different from upping the minimum supported iOS version (which is allowed) but this seems to be the case.