Issue 36

6^th April 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

News

I was pretty sure I would be talking about WWDC selling out in 20 minutes this week but the ticket announcement never arrived. I am not sure how much longer I can take the tension of waiting for it.

I thought the most surprising thing about this was that the Symbian smartphone market share did not fall at all in the last year. Sadly it seems like the market share for Windows Phone did however.

iOS Dev UK was a really great time last year and I fully expect this year to be just as much fun. I should add the disclaimer to this link that I am speaking there again this year but I would have linked to it regardless of that.

Tools

I was already using iCloud photo stream to capture screenshots like this but I was using iPhoto to grab them on the desktop. Turns out John Marstall has discovered that iPhoto isn’t a necessary part of this process at all, great tip.

Code

Interesting project by Mike Ash and Landon Fuller to bring true weak references to iOS 4 and Mac OS X 10.6.

Peter Steinberger with a good clarification on when will/didChangeValueForKey calls are needed when writing KVO code.

Jason Brennan with a sensible style guide for Objective-C coding, the only real thing I disagree with is the advice to never use XIB files/Storyboards.

Design

Smart tool from MacRabbit for automating the export of Photoshop layers into PNG files based on the layer name in the PSD file. The only obvious thing that seemed to be missing was automatic @2x support but I am sure it will be added soon.

Business and Marketing

Given that this first part of four weighs in at over 7,000 words I think this might have made a better short book than a series of blog posts but this looks to be a nice take on the popular question of how to make some money from your app.

Ryan Bateman with a detailed write up of the first few weeks of his Android Instapaper client, Papermill.