Issue 5

2^nd September 2011

Written by Dave Verwer

News

Another week, another iOS beta with significant iCloud improvements and they also flicked the switch on iTunes match (still US only unfortunately). Feels to me like it is getting close to release.

Spotify inside your iOS app

3rd party iOS Spotify clients ahoy!

Tools

iTunes Connect App Status Flowchart

The App Store review process is a much more predictable and stable beast than it used to be but it is still a process with several possibilities for rejection. This diagram gives a nice clear explanation of what can happen during the process.

Xcode 4 Colour Themes

Just a few colour schemes for Xcode 4, if you have any more I am sure the repository would appreciate a pull request containing yours!

Continuous Integration with Xcode and Jenkins

Great write up of a way to start to get Jenkins (previously Hudson) set up to automatically run CI builds of your iOS and Mac apps.

Code

Google APIs Client Library for Objective-C

New library for accessing a good number of Google JSON APIs. Seems nice and simple.

iOS Audio & OpenAL

I must admit that Core Audio (and OpenAL) scare me silly. You too? Well how about almost 2 hours of a presentation from Silicon Valley CocoaHeads to take the edge off it?

Hyphenation with Core Text on the iPad

Frank Zheng with an interesting article on hyphenation in the often overlooked but very powerful Core Text framework.

What’s New for Developers in Mac OS X Lion

Ole Begemann with the last part of his comprehensive look at the new APIs in Lion. Not strictly iOS but so good it needed including here!

Design

Making beautiful forms; Square and Recurly

We don’t have access to Square over here in the UK yet so I haven’t seen this in action but this is a lovely analysis of some of the design decisions made while designing the Square credit card entry form.

Noise and textures

If I could had to sum up iOS design in four words they would be “Subtle gradients and textures”. Bjango give us a few more than four words on the creation of those subtle textures using Photoshop. Bonus points for including the sample PSD as well!

Business and Marketing

Analytics For iOS Games

Noel Llopis with a great round up of analytics options for iOS apps. Plenty of options and I must admit that I hadn’t noticed Flurry was adding such a huge amount of weight to my app binaries!

How I name my apps

Is picking a name for your app the hardest part of building it? Probably not, but it has to be close.