Issue 32

Comment

I hope you all managed to get your pre-orders in for the new shiny yesterday before the shipping date started to slip from days into weeks. If you were not lucky enough to bag one then let me instead deliver you a consolation prize of a bumper issue of iOS Dev Weekly.

News

TestFlight + Burstly = TestFlight Live

So TestFlight got acquired by Burstly and they are expanding into also providing analytics and advertising services as well as beta provisioning. Keep your fingers crossed that they don't mess up the fantastic service that they have right now.

Apple Names All-Time Top App Store Apps

Really nice to see a good number of indie apps make the top 25 all time lists.

App Store download cap bumped up to 50MB for OTA downloads

This one almost slipped by in the excitement of the new iPad announcements but Apple the over the air install limits for the app store have been raised to 50Mb.

Tools

Unity goes Free

Speculation is that this is in advance of a major new version being released but let's not be hasty to judge as what was $800 last week is now free until April 8th. What are you waiting for?

Yay! Codes

Interesting little service to assist with distributing promo codes. I must admit that keeping track of which codes were sent to who can be a real pain.

Code

Touchpose

Simple to implement library by Todd Reed which will show touch point overlays on an external display. Combine this with the Reflection app that I linked last week and you have a top class solution for recording iOS screencasts and demos.

Key-Value Observing Done Right: Take 2

Gwynne Raskind writing for Mike Ash takes on rethinking the KVO APIs. I really hope that Apple give KVO some block based love in iOS 6, but until then this is well worth a look.

ARC retain cycles and blocks

Mugunth Kumar on blocks, ARC and retain cycles. If you don't understand retain cycles properly, you very probably have leaks in your apps and this should be top of your reading list.

iOS push notifications sends user-untraceable sounds

Mariano Abdala talks about the potential for abuse with audio only push notifications. I haven't heard of any apps that are using this maliciously but he makes a good point.

Design

Buttons were an inspired UI hack, but now we've got better options

Josh Clark being interviewed by Jenn Webb for O'Reilly on the rise and fall of the humble button.

Font Awesome

Originally designed for Twitter bootstrap but just as useful for iOS apps. Dave Gandy has released a fabulous, royalty free font full of well drawn, useful icons.

Business and Marketing

The fall and rise of Whale Trail

I had read about the story of UsTwo when Whale Trail first came out but if you haven't read about the story of how it came to be it is quite an interesting one.

Hot new iPhone apps by irresponsible developers

Too harsh a headline in my opinion, but Joe Clark makes a good point that enabling accessibility in iOS is super easy and something that we should all be thinking about.