Issue 40

4^th May 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Friday everyone!

Dave Verwer

News

I’m a little surprised it took this long for apps using the Dropbox SDK to start getting rejected for this. As much as I really don’t like this rule, Apple have been agressively enforcing it for quite a while now.

NSConference tickets sold out almost as quickly as WWDC this year so if you missed it you might be interested to see that the videos of the sessions have now been put on sale.

Tools

I agree with Brian Webster here that “one tab per task” in Xcode 4 is how tabs were designed to be used. If tabs had been implemented to only switch the editing area it might have worked more like a traditional editor (although would have had compromises in other areas).

New Stack Overflow client for the iPad from BigBig Bomb makes watching relevant tags the primary feature but actually adds usability over the web site in many ways. I especially liked the full screen code view.

Interesting project from MacRuby creator (and until recently, maintainer) Laurent Sansonetti. I tried to get as excited about this as everyone else is but as much as I love Ruby as a language, for me it just doesn’t fit for interacting with the iOS SDK.

An in-depth look at the process of sharing code with a static library by Jamie Montgomerie. Essential reading if you are distributing or planning to distrubute a static library for iOS.

Code

Simple little class from Brandon Williams which helps you decide when to block the main thread (if you must) based on whether any scrolling is currently happening in your UI.

Ryan Dillon with our weekly reminder to use Instruments in this interesting article on threaded rendering of text effects.

Design

Matt Gemmell with another excellent UX post, it is always tempting to just to go with the familiar in terms of designing a UI and now I am struggling to think of a way to end this sentence without saying “Think Different”.

Lukas Mathis on a very similar topic, don’t be afraid to throw it all away and start again.

New Photoshop plugin from UIParade, looks like a time saver.