Issue 51

20^th July 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

News

I am guessing you all saw this story but just in case you have been living under a rock for the last week here it is (it also lets me introduce the next link with a bit of context). This was covered by everyone but I think The Next Web had a pretty good write up of the In-App Purchase exploit from last week.

And in response a service called Beeblex has launched with an easy way to properly validate IAP receipts without having to run your own server for receipt validation.

The main NSConference is always one of the conference highlights of the year for me (and for many other European developers too). Looks like they are trying something a little different with this one day design focused event.

Tools

This is a slick, web based prototyping and wireframing tool for building quick iOS (and others) app mockups. Feels a bit like the Xcode storyboard editor but implemented in a web browser.

Joachim Bondo with a command line tool and companion Automator action for snipping the top 20 points from an iOS screenshot. I prefer to put a “perfect” status bar on my screenshots rather than snip them (more on that coming in a couple of weeks) but you should be doing something to clean up your status bars before uploading to iTunes Connect and this tool makes it super easy.

This isn’t iOS specific but we all need a decent text editor don’t we? I have been using Sublime Text as my day to day “everything except Objective-C” editor for a while now and have really grown to love it. This article is a pretty good compilation of everything that made me switch from TextMate to Sublime a few months ago.

Code

Steve Streza with a simple library for easing the OAuth pain of working with the authenticated Twitter API. Anything that takes OAuth pain away has to be a good thing.

Interesting article by Mike Abdullah on stopping NSString throwing your secure data all over the place by using a custom CFAllocator. A good reminder to always think about what you are doing with Keychain data after retrieving it.

Nice reminder from Munguth Kumar to not forget about all of that juicy information hidden away inside NSError objects.

Design

Published by the GestureWorks project but useful to anyone who is building gesture based documentation or specs. This font and collection of EPS files contains a huge number of gesture illustrations. Useful.

New site which aims to hook up mobile fluent designers with developers in need of some help with their pixels. Might be worth a look if you are trying to find that perfect designer to work with.

And finally...

How had I not noticed this before? Gorgeous, playful icon design in Mail.app.