Issue 45

8^th June 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I should be packing for WWDC and instead I find myself writing this. Help. Hopefully it all went well and this gets delivered as normal while I am flying through the air half way across the Atlantic.

Dave Verwer

News

It’s a good news, bad news situation for Rogue Amoeba after Airfoil Touch 3 was removed from the app store a couple of weeks ago.

What an excellent use of the iOS background location API. Have your app’s content automatically updated when entering/leaving a predefined location. I actually first came across this technique earlier this week when Marco Arment mentioned adding it to Instapaper, but he credits News.me with the original idea so here is their announcement.

WWDC

Let’s get the important stuff linked first. WWDC Parties has the usual comprehensive list of evening events for next week. It’s going to be a busy week.

The official Apple WWDC guide, get the app and some quick tips direct from the horses mouth.

Bill Dudney with a great suggestion if you have a long flight to San Francisco planned for this weekend. Download and recap on some of the best sessions from WWDC 2011 while you fly.

Jeff LaMarche with an update to his annual first timer’s guide to WWDC. If this is your first year then you really want to read this.

Mark Pospesel with another WWDC survival guide. Mark also links to both the “Indie Dev Lab” and the “Appsterdam WWDC HQ”, both of which I have linked to before but just in case you missed them you should be checking them out if you are in SF next week (even if you have a conference ticket).

Tools

Daniel Jalkut on digging inside app bundles and uncrushing PNG files. Be sure to check out the couple of updates and comments at the end of the post for some additional tips including ImageOptim which is something I will certainly be investigating further.

Not a brand new article but I came across it this article by David Smith this week and thought it was a great check list of ways to reduce your bundle size to sneak under that 50Mb 3G limit. The only thing not mentioned here is the ImageOptim tip mentioned in Daniel’s post above.

This tip from Junior B might be overkill for most debugging tasks but I had no idea this existed and given that it goes to tmp rather than cluttering up the console log this could be way more useful than it initially seems.

Code

Chris Ross, Kieran Gutteridge and a few others started this tweaking of the iOS SDK for Facebook at a hack day last weekend with the admirable goal of making a more usable SDK to work with Facebook on the iOS platform. It is possible that this could be Sherlocked next week but even if it is it will still be useful for iOS4/5 compatible apps. Great work.

It was always a little disappointing that MapKit didn’t include any kind of directions overlay functionality. Seems like Matthias Tretter felt the same way and so MTDirectionsKit was born to solve just that problem.

It’s very easy to say “Siri should have a 3rd party API” but Samuel Iglesias points out that implementing that API is not quite as simple as it may first seem though. I wonder if we will see any moves towards this next week.

Design

Fascinating article by Stephen van Egmond on the accessibility features on iOS in the most unlikely of Apple apps, the camera.

And finally...

Some of these are hilarious, I especially liked the one I am linking to here but you should have a browse around the site at the rest.