Issue 55

17^th August 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

How is it Friday already? I have no idea where this week went. Before we get started with the links I have had several people email/tweet me recently asking if I would consider adding some Mac development news to iOS Dev Weekly and I wanted to gauge reaction to the idea so if you have a few seconds (literally) then I would appreciate it if you could let me know if you would mind some occasional Mac related links as well as iOS ones.

Dave Verwer

News

Not really sure what to say about this other than it would be great to see Apple not only remove a single plagiarised app from this developer’s account but in clear cases like this and shut the whole account down. However the inevitable complication comes on where to draw the line on “clear cases”. Jeff has also posted a follow up post as well so you might want to read that as well.

So StackMob have released a beta of v1.0 of their SDK this week with a major departure from their previous SDK. The reason for these big changes are interesting though and I think this is the first 3rd party API SDK that I have seen using NSIncrementalStore in anger.

This video of the always entertaining and knowledgable Graham Lee being interviewed earlier this year at the goto conference in Copenhagen is worth a watch if you have even as passing interest in iOS security.

Tools

Since the release of Lion, I have got used to apps like Preview terminating/suspending automatically but I must admit that I have already been annoyed a few times by the same feature being added to Xcode. I am going to try and stick with it but if the annoyance is too much for you then Keith Harrison has the info on how to disable it.

Code

Hari Karam Singh has put together this comprehensive quick reference card for the new Objective-C literal syntax including a few caveats which you may want to think about when using this new syntax.

Mike Ash took a slightly different tack with his Friday Q&A last week and took a tour around the CommonCrypto library included with iOS covering hashing, HMACs and Encryption.

This may be my new answer to the question “Can you recommend a C tutorial?”. Uli Kusterer’s guide to C programming takes you step by step through writing a non-trivial C program. This seems to have been around a while but I came across a link to it this week as it as just been updated for Xcode 4.4. I have to say I love the site name as well.

Tom Dalling with a good warning on the dangers of performSelector: when returning structs rather than objects.

Design

Wise words from Sebastiaan de With on just stopping to think for a second before implementing that custom UI that you saw.

Business and Marketing

Great little web based tool for creating a quick and simple site to promote your iOS app. My only suggestion for them would be to allow a page to be created before an app is live on the App Store as it seems to currently only allow sites to be created by crawling apple.com for the initial metadata.

And finally...

Have you seen the new version of Xcode? Errr… hold on a minute.