Issue 56

24^th August 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So the results of last week’s poll were fairly conclusive with over 80% of you either wanting or not minding a few Mac related links in with the iOS content. Don’t get me wrong, this is not going to turn into a Mac focused email and it will still be primarily iOS content but there will occasionally be a new section with a few Mac related links from now on.

Oh and to all of you who suggested that I start Mac Dev Weekly, I’ll do that when you get me 8 days in a week. Deal?

News

This post on the Facebook engineering blog about the new Facebook app for iOS takes a look behind the scenes at some of the changes they have made with their new release this week. Interesting how they say they are caching both CTFramesetter layouts and also calculated row heights to increase scrolling speed on that main UI table view.

I am not exactly sure when this changed but I found out about it this week. At one point a DUNS number was only needed for Enterprise accounts but it seems like all iOS developer program company accounts now need one in order to sign up.

Tools

Michael Fey with a great unrecognised selector debugging tip. I have been partial to a generic exception breakpoint for a long time now but the stack traces coming out of breaking on doesNotRecognizeSelector: specifically seem to be much better. Great tip.

Code

Nick Farina on building an imitation of the MapKit style callout control. He describes it as painstakingly recreated and I would have to agree, the level of attention to detail is seriously impressive. This is the kind of quality of open source control that I love to see being built for iOS.

Rasmus Andersson with an interesting TCP over USB library for allowing an iOS device to communicate with a Mac using a USB the 30 pin connector. When I first saw this I figured it might need Jailbreak but I just tested it and it doesn’t, happy days.

Mattt Thompson talking at the New York iOS developer meetup talking about 5 lessons learned from the ongoing development of the open source AFNetworking library. From pull request comment novellas on thread safety through to dealing with multiple JSON libraries this is a really interesting look at keeping the design of a popular open source library on the straight and narrow.

macOS Development

For the first ever link in the Mac Development section of iOS Dev Weekly Jeff LaMarche takes a look at SceneKit. The new scene graph management framework introduced with Mountain Lion. Like Jeff, I hope we see this on iOS one day as it looks fantastic.

Business and Marketing

This is a great article from Josh Lehman beautifully debunking the old joke of people spending more on a coffee every day than your app. I found myself agreeing with every word.

Simon Wolf on the perils of building client apps which subsequently get permanently rejected by Apple. The good news is that this specific story has had a happy ending with the apps in question being re-approved for the App Store yesterday but Simon offers some good advice for making sure your clients are aware of the risks around this.

Infographic from Tap magazine with a round up of stats on the App Store and iOS device numbers. The only surprising one here for me was the (relatively) low percentage of apps which are iPad native I would have thought it was more than a third of the total amount of apps.

And finally...

The always fascinating John Carmack giving the Keynote at QuakeCon 2012 talking not about games but about the practicalities of software development. He does talk a little about iOS later but not enough to make it into a main section above. Fascinating talk though.