Issue 47

22^nd June 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

News

Just in case you have been living under a rock all week, four days after WWDC ended Apple have finally released the WWDC 2012 videos. Don’t forget to download the sample code too which is available on the left hand side of the page after signing in.

New podcast from Wolf Rentzsch and Andrew Pontious on all things related to Apple development. This week’s show is a fairly deep look at (or rant about) the Xcode 4 UI.

Tools

Erica Sadun of TUAW taking a look at Test Studio for iOS from Telerik which is an on device integration test recording and playback tool which shipped this week. No jailbreaking required, just a static library compiled into your debug build. Interesting.

Useful tool released this week by Damian Kołakowski for viewing details of the iOS view hierarchy in your app including visualisation of the structure and inspectors for various properties and geometry. This could become an invaluable tool, I wonder if this kind of thing will ever be built directly into Xcode/Instruments?

Code

Following on from Brent’s dot syntax article a couple of issues ago Steffen Itterheim takes a look at some of the horrific things that are possible with dot syntax in Xcode. I am a big proponent of dot syntax these days but am really strict with myself on only using it for property manipulation.

Hot off the back of the iOS 6/Facebook announcements last week, Facebook have published a very short post with a few details of some of the changes they are planning to support and extend the built in APIs in iOS 6.

Design

Not sure I like the tinted status bar yet although I am sure I will get used to it quickly once I run with iOS 6 for a while. Anyway Simon Blommegård has been experimenting with how the colour for the status bar is decided, I wonder why they pick the bottom pixel and not the top colour?

Business and Marketing

Interesting infographic from AppAnnie comparing revenue and downloads between the App Store and Google Play broken along with some analysis of the numbers. I thought it was interesting that 25% of total revenues on iOS come from China and Japan (time to fill in those Japanese tax forms?).

And finally...

I loved this unboxing of the MagSafe 2 adapter photoset by Paul Kafasis.