Issue 52

27^th July 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Friday everyone.

So this week Mountain Lion was released, Apple posted another great set of figures in their annual call and iOS Dev Weekly reached the end of its first year of bringing you a few developer related links every week.

I have always been surprised by how popular this format of rounding up the news for the week is. After deciding to do it, setting up a sign-up form and tweeting it, more than 600 people signed up before the first issue was even sent (thanks for the added pressure) and since then the numbers have grown slowly but steadily until this week when we tipped over 4,100 people. Thank you all for subscribing.

There have been downsides though and I am afraid that writing this every week has permanently changed me. I am now pathologically afraid of exclamation marks and that word that begins with an f and means “no money” as using either of them means that spam filters everywhere kick into action and half of you don’t receive the email. Still, I can live with that.

Anyway, enough listening to me ramble on. Thanks again for subscribing and for spreading the word. I have been overwhelmed by the response and feedback that people have been so kind to send and I hope I can keep on producing something that you all want to read. I will shut up now before this goes all teary eyed Oscar speech and instead say… Bring on the links…

Thanks
Dave

Dave Verwer

News

Lots of words written this week about the Sparrow acquisition by Google and it was hard to know which article to link to here. I liked this article Matthew Panzarino which has a level headed look at the deal but if he is right that the business model wasn’t sustainable (also suggested by several other people this week) then that is indeed disappointing for us all.

Parse seem to be adding features at quite a pace and have this week added support for hosted In-App Purchases with minimal fuss. If you are comfortable having a hosted back end for your iOS app then they have to be in with a chance of your business.

Tools

Great tip from Carl Brown on using Spotlight to search WWDC slides to easily find relevant session videos to watch.

This week sees an updated version of this excellent Quick look plug-in originally released for Lion. I really don’t think there is an easier way than this to view the details of a provisioning profile.

Code

Good to see that Apple have taken swift action on the IAP exploit of last week. If you use In-App Purchase then you want to have a good read through this document and the attached files.

Apple have revamped/replaced their Objective-C programming guide which so many of us surely used to get started with the language. Rewritten and updated to include everything from blocks and other reasonably recent advances right through to the new Objective-C literal syntax which only shipped two days ago with Xcode 4.4. The original “Objective-C Programming Language” document still seems to be available as of right now but I would not be surprised if this new version replaces it soon.

I hadn’t come across this style of transition before but I quite like the idea. This implementation of the technique from Krzysztof Zabłocki is not only open source but does it using layer masks to avoid the lag of taking screenshots before peeling back the content.

Design

A beautiful new redistributable, open source font from Natanael Gama which was originally funded on Kickstarter. I hadn’t heard about this until this but it looks like a successful project to me.

And finally...

They missed the ★☆☆☆☆ review but apart from that, spot on.