Issue 30

24^th February 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

News

So Xcode 4.3 was released last week and now lives in /Applications rather than having its own /Developer folder. This has needed some major changes to how it is installed and used so Peter Hosey wrote a great run down of the main changes and what tools have been moved to where.

Chris Parker with a solid gold piece on separation of responsibilities within your code. Taking Chris’s advice on this subject is something we should all strive to do, and not only because it will make his job at WWDC easier.

Tools

Don McAllister writes about the various ways to capture screencasts of your iOS apps, useful for creating marketing or training resources. As he says though, a bigger problem than capturing the output is effectively showing interaction which is a problem not only when recording video output but also when using your app via a projector.

Such tasty treats coming down the line with LLVM 4.0 which was included with the Mountain Lion developer preview release. Thanks to whoever runs this tumblr for breaking the NDA so I can link to this.

Code

Apple have published a set of beginner guides to help people new to iOS development. They cover everything from a tutorial on how to build your first app right through to articles on design patterns, interface design and uploading to the app store.

This is something I used to take advantage of when I was writing Mac apps but never took the time to research it on iOS. Matt Gemmell gives a good overview of the process and has some useful links to additional code and tools which will make using PDF images easier to deal with.

Talking of PDF icons, Peyton Randolph has a great UIView subclass for displaying masked icons from a single source image, or PDF.

Nik Burns on the settings URL schema which allowed deep linking into the settings app but which is unfortunately gone in iOS 5.1. Nik also has a radar number to dupe if you want to voice your opinion to Apple on this as well.

Design

A great set of icons for those times that you absolutely positively have to have every single toolbar icon you would ever need.

Business and Marketing

Stunning numbers. Who says that you shouldn’t try and compete in a crowded market place like todo list apps?