Issue 46

15^th June 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

What a week! Did you all see that announcement about ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛? How about the new ⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ in ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛? Oh and you can’t possibly have missed all that goodness in the new ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛. I am really glad that Apple doesn’t check these emails before they go out or that would all have been redacted.

Dave Verwer

News

A great, non NDA breaking round up of some of what we can talk about in iOS 6 by Keith Harrison.

However Chuck Toporek has a better suggestion. If you are a member of the iOS developer programme then do yourself a favour and log in to check out the full juicy details with the release notes and API diffs. It’s going to be a great release.

Video recorded at this week’s Spotify developer meetup with talks from Mike Ash, Daniel Kennett and Joachim Bengtsson. Mike’s talk is predictably impressive (see “Circle” below) but there is great content in them all. I was unable to get a ticket to the event this week so am really glad they put the video out so quickly.

Tools

This looks to be a must have if you use TestFlight or TestFlight Live. Automatic archive detection and uploading of the archive and associated dSYM file.

Early stages of a new Mac tool by Amy Worrall to submit simple radars without having to visit the bug reporter. One to watch (or even contribute to) as things progress.

Interesting open source project released by Facebook that was recommended to me this week. It does code review, bug tracking and some other stuff. Looks like it is worth checking out.

Code

Brent Simmons with a plea for consistency with dot syntax. I couldn’t agree more and actually think it was a step backwards for this issue when Apple started letting no-parameter methods show up in autocompletion in 4.3 which makes the problem just a little bit worse.

So this looks like a really interesting project. Mike Ash has released an Objective-C ARC retain cycle detector and collector. Not safe for production (at least not now, and maybe not ever according to Mike) but a very interesting experiment.

Design

A quick look at the issue of sensibly placing iOS “Done” buttons for dismissing modal view controllers and ends up with a resounding “it depends” but with some good discussion on the way there.

Business and Marketing

A solid list of tips for those of you just starting out as independent or freelance developers from Carl Brown although I would say that any developer should be doing most of these.