Issue 49

6^th July 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Back to our regularly scheduled, on time service this week. Happy Friday and enjoy the links…

Dave Verwer

News

Unfortunately I got hit by this issue this week with an update to one of our apps that went live on Wednesday. The issue seems to be fixed now for new installs but if you released an app this week you may have customers who downloaded a bad version of your app so be aware of this if you are getting unusual support requests.

Tools

Oliver Jones takes a look at using AppCode by JetBrains instead of Xcode in this talk from Melbourne Cocoaheads. I am not sure I could switch to it but there are certainly some great Objective-C features in this editor. You might also want to check out the other videos on the Melbourne Cocoaheads Vimeo account as there is a load of great content here.

Chris Wilson with a nice round up of current Cocos 2D tools and helpers covering everything from creating sprite sheets, level layouts and particle effects to sound effects. It looks like it is still being updated so it might be worth checking back in a couple of days on this one.

Gus Mueller previews an interesting retina export feature which is a hidden preference in the new beta of his image editor, Acorn. This type of workflow is especially useful if you have assets that don’t automatically scale down well and need tweaking for standard resolution.

Code

If you need a Core Data sync solution which works using Dropbox instead of iCloud or if you need to support older iOS versions then this project may be interesting to you. Originally created by Tim Isted and now maintained by Michael Fey of No Thirst Software it has been under development for quite a while but was just recently made available as open source. It is great to see code like this made public.

Remind me why you aren’t using ARC yet? Steffen Itterheim debunks 8 reasons he has heard from people who are resisting the jump to ARC.

Pete Steinberger with a useful snippet of code to make the private recursiveDescription method on UIView much more descriptive. Obviously only for debug use so don’t forget to remove it before you submit your apps.

Graham Lee with an updated version of his password hashing code which wraps the CommonCrypto C functions in a convenient Objective-C API.

This looks to be a fairly flexible implementation of an expandable, hierarchical table view in using UITableView. Worth a look if you need to solve this problem in an app.

Design

Wonderful post by Chris Sauve with analysis of the evolution of icons on Mac OS and iOS looking at both Apple and third party apps.

Business and Marketing

I mentioned last week that I didn’t think that public replies to App Store reviews were the right solution and Matt Gemmell was obviously thinking the same as he made a great post this week on why public responses would be a terrible idea. Needless to say I agree with everything he says here.

If you enjoyed this or found some useful links in this email then please do spread the word by forwarding it to a friend or colleague.