Issue 39

27^th April 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

What a week for Apple with profit up by 94% in the earnings call and the release and subsequent sell out of WWDC tickets in around 2 hours. I hope you all got a ticket if you were planning to go. I was one of the lucky ones and will be there again so if you see me, please do say Hello.

Dave Verwer

News

If you were one of the lucky ones or if you’ll just be in San Francisco on the Sunday before WWDC. Scott Knaster and Patrick Burleson are organising this year’s annual pilgrimage to the Apple company store. Go buy yourself a t-shirt and meet some new people.

This is an interesting alternative for those planning a San Francisco WWDC week without a ticket. It would be nice to see this get off the ground to give those who are ticketless a week with a bit more structure.

Tools

As Brent says, “At this point it’s become a matter of religion”. Unfortunately this may be the best time saver in this week’s email.

I especially liked the use of Jenkins in Mike Nachbaur’s app store release checklist.

Code

Great advice from Brent Simmons, but the 4th point is the really important one.

For those times where you just have to have another pull to refresh feature. SVPullToRefresh by Sam Vermette seems to be a simpler approach to the feature and so it has to be worth a link.

This simple, ARC compatible Keychain wrapper from Mark Granoff looks to be a nice lightweight solution for easy Keychain item storage.

Design

Neven Mrgan on a new app from UI Forge, Screenshot Journal. I don’t know about you all but I take screenshots all the time but they do tend to get mixed in with the regular photos I am taking as well.

Following on from last week’s coding tutorial on building a chat room app, I came across this article which tackles the same problem but focuses purely on the design.

Business and Marketing

A fascinating account of how the Draw Something engineers scaled, scaled and scaled again the back end for Draw Something including complete rewrites of the server code and storage mechanisms.

David Smith has updated his iOS 5 adoption post with iOS 5.1 and iOS 5.0.1 stats. He is seeing iOS 5 adoption up to almost 85% which has to be good news. It is always good to take stats like these with a reasonable pinch of salt as the stats are specific to his app but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still useful.

And finally...

I am going to file this under “just because it’s possible”.