Issue 44

1^st June 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

News

Let’s Have Some Fun with the Preliminary Schedule for WWDC 2012

As much as I want to see an App Store for the Apple TV (and I really do), I am not sure I really believe it will happen now and those TBA sessions on the schedule are always less exciting than the rumours when the conference kicks off. It’s always fun to speculate though as John Gruber proves.

iOS Security

This week Apple put out a new document with a high level overview of Security on iOS. This is a great overview of the security features in iOS and definitely worth a read.

Tools

The Design of LLVM

Chris Lattner (the original author of LLVM) with a fantastic article on Dr. Dobbs about the design of LLVM. I am not very much of a low level person but this was fascinating, give it a try even if compiler technology isn’t something you usually read about.

HockeyApp is Awesome

Colin Donnell on Hockey and its live crash reporting features. I use TestFlight rather than Hockey but they recently added the same feature to their SDK (which hit 1.0 this week). Wouldn’t it be nice if iTunes Connect had this level of crash reporting and we didn’t need a 3rd party library?

Qwarkee

From Illustrator (through SVG export) to Core Graphics Objective-C code in a single button press. It will be interesting to see how complex the input files can be and how reliable the output is but this was an instant purchase for me just in case it works.

Code

UIImage imageNamed: from anywhere

I had no idea that imageNamed: could be used to load images from outside the bundle. AppSandwich has published a small category to add some convenience methods to UIImage for doing exactly that.

Importing Data Made Easy

Saul Mora again on the new importing functionality added to the MagicalRecord framework.

Class clusters, placeholder objects and value-oriented programming

Graham Lee with a look at object creation in Objective-C.

Design

IICNS

I am not sure how long this site has been around but I came across it this week and it is a great showcase of beautiful iOS icon art. I wonder if the name was inspired by PTTRNS.

Business and Marketing

Promo codes from previous app versions still work

Another tip for dealing with promo codes from Aleksandar Vacić prompted by the conversation about promo codes I linked to last week. Useful to know.

And finally...

TrollCode

Turn the beachball in Xcode into light relief, I like the idea of a global leaderboard of Xcode beachball time.