Issue 41

11^th May 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

News

Benjamin Sandofsky writing on the compromises that come with the HTML/JavaScript cross-platform frameworks for building mobile apps. The graph in the article says it all for me, I often come across people who started with something like PhoneGap but quickly ran into problems as they tried to add features over and above the standard controls.

Sad news this week that SketchShare has been removed from the App Store by Apple for not being a game while at the same time using Game Centre. I can’t see anything specific in the review guidelines which forbids this but reading the comments on this post, it appears that other people have been running into this problem recently so just beware if you are using Game Centre in your app.

Jeff Atwood with an article about cat feeders and software development, obviously.

Tools

Graham Lee hacking around with the C interface to libclang to produce a Smalltalk style object browser for Objective-C.

Lots of discussion around RubyMotion this week but I found myself nodding along to all of Cesare Rocchi’s points as I read this post. I also agree that a REPL console embedded in the debugger would be a great addition to Xcode.

Code

Interesting port of the .net Reactive Extensions to Objective-C by Josh Abernathy of GitHub. It feels like KVO+ to me (in a good way) but you should go and check out the sample code to see what is possible.

Twitter have released an official port of their text handling libraries for Objective-C this week. If you are interacting with data from Twitter at all then I would imagine this library is going to come in very handy.

An experiment with typesafe arrays and dictionaries in Objective-C from Joachim Bengtsson.

Four part blog series (or short book) from Ray Wenderlich on using UIDocument with iCloud that starts with the basics but goes right through to creating a fully syncing app.

Business and Marketing

Flow Studio interviews Andreas Illiger, author my favourite ever iOS game on his development process, dealing with success and what might be coming next.