Issue 29

17^th February 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Big news this week with the announcement of OS X Mountain Lion but I am sure you all saw the headlines yesterday so @{ @"On" : @"with", @"the" : @"links" }.

Dave Verwer

News

After the news that Apple are going to add a location services style prompt to accessing address book data, Dave Addey has written about the larger problem of ownership of contact information. Unfortunately the only solution to this problem is for everyone to agree to keep their moral compasses handy.

After all of the address book and privacy issues over the last couple of weeks, Matt Gemmell has written about the principles of hashing. It is very likely that as a subscriber here that you already know most of this but just in case you don’t this is a great, mostly non-technical overview.

Code

I am usually the person saying that you shouldn’t go creating your own gesture recognisers (for usability rather than tech reasons) but I think this article by Thomas Mellenthin this is a perfect example of where a custom gesture is exactly the right choice.

Nick Harris with some code for recreating the slide out navigation seen in several iOS UIs recently by animating an image view with a screenshot around. I have been doing some experimentation with storyboard segues recently and there is so much you can do with Core Graphics/Core Image and a simple screenshot of a view controller.

Want a lightweight Objective-C wrapper around SQLite? Look no further than FMDB by Gus Mueller which hit the big two point oh this week.

Brad Larson released an interesting library this week for doing customisable Core Image style effects with OpenGL ES, oh and for extra bonus points it is also compatible with iOS 4.

Just in case you suddenly decide you are in need of an easy to use hashing class, Karelia software have a nice open source class for generating a SHA1.

Design

Such a great article from Mike Swanson about the design process for his app, Halftone. His point on “the burden of professional knowledge” allowing our knowledge of technical difficulty affecting how likely we are to attempt to implement a feature really resonated with me but the whole article is excellent.

Business and Marketing

I love the idea from this of Apple basing chart positions on not only download numbers but also usage data. To see the top 25 most used iOS apps as a category on the store would be amazing, I wonder if Apple will ever give us an official analytics API and do this.

Another look at the end to end process of building an iOS app from Artem Lapitski with some solid marketing tips towards the end of the article.