Issue 48

29^th June 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Apologies for the time, turns out there were not quite enough hours in this week and so we are a little late. Got there eventually though so on with the links.

Dave Verwer

News

If you wondered what all of those wonderful developers from Sofa and Push Pop Press have been doing inside Facebook for the last year then I think you now have your answer. Apparently the design of the app is identical to the previous version so this will be an interesting opportunity to directly compare performance between the two (not that I expect the results to be much of a surprise).

Justine Pratt on the recent updates to the search algorithms used on the App Store. You might want to check your rankings and take a look at the keywords you are using.

Tools

I just tried this with a set of 5 large, colourful PNG files from an app of ours and the size savings were certainly very impressive with a ~70% reduction on average. The images still worked perfectly inside the app and the only issue was that there was a slight (but noticable) muting of the colours in the new versions. I also wonder how it affects in-app decoding performance compared to PNGCrush processed files but I haven’t had chance to check this yet.

If you are using Cocos2D and want some prettier than average particle effects then this just might be the tool for you. I missed this when it was first released but it’s on sale for the bargain price of free right now so you might want to pick it up.

Craig Hockenberry with a really useful set of tips for getting around some of the challenges you might be running into debugging Core Data objects.

No idea of when (or even if) this will be included with iOS but I thought this was interesting news from the SQLite world.

Code

Mike Ash digging into Objective-C Literals, I think the first code snippet in this post is one my favourite bits of code ever.

I found this wonderful post in the comments on the Friday Q&A post linked above. Stuart Carnie has been hacking on Clang recently and this article describes how he experimented with adding a new literal syntax to the compiler. I really loved this article as it takes a look at extending Clang with a real world, understandable example. Great work.

It was inevitable that there was going to be open source implementations of the ansiotropic slider handle from iOS 6 music app and it looks like Daniel Amitay got there first (or at least this was the first one I saw).

Business and Marketing

This is a tricky problem but I am not sure allowing public responses from developers is the right solution as the last thing we want for App Store reviews to degenerate into public arguments. However as the article mentions, if there were a way to have a private conversation with the reviewer that would be a huge step in the right direction.

And finally...

Cabel Sasser with a hilarious support email. I wonder when this bug will be fixed.