Issue 34

23^rd March 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

News

Kevin Dent tweets that Apple are now rejecting apps for accessing the device UDID. I may be able to give more information about this next week as I have an update in review at the moment which would potentially be hit by this but it seems like the rejections for doing this may have started.

I love the idea of this privacy pledge from Graham Lee and had no hesitation in signing it.

What a great line up of speakers for this upcoming conference in Melbourne. I had the pleasure of meeting one of the speakers for One More Thing, Lee Armstrong at NSConference this week and if the rest of the stories being told at the conference are half as interesting as his then this is going to be a great event.

Tools

It is always a good idea to test your apps with exactly the versions of iOS that you support but since Apple don’t support downgrading devices that can be easier said than done. This article on chpwn has some great advice on your options for older device testing.

Code

The Clang documentation was updated this week with a great overview of the new Objective-C syntactic sugar for literals. So good, I can’t wait for this to ship.

Really interesting technique for giving fake shadow lighting to a Core Animation layer, smart thinking from Joel Kraut for those times when OpenGL would be overkill.

Great article by Mike Nachbaur on resuming downloads using the standard NSURLx classes, I would suspect that many people should be taking advantage of this and probably haven’t bothered. It’s easy, go fix your download code now.

Design

Another icon template including retina iPad support, I especially like this one as it shows you the icon in place right there in the PSD and has some bundled actions for exporting both square (for submission) and rounded (for marketing) versions of the icon.

Talking of iOS icons, Matt Comi has discovered an interesting set of images buried inside Xcode in a MobileIcons.framework which are the masks and treatments used by iOS at runtime.

Business and Marketing

So Draw Something has been snapped up already, Ryan Lawler speculates on the reasons and whether this is a smart move for Zynga.

There really must be a better way to earn money from apps than this.