Issue 57

Comment

Happy Friday everyone. There hasn't been a huge amount of news this week we are going straight into the other sections with this issue. Enjoy.

Tools

PonyDebugger: Remote Debugging Tools for Native iOS Apps

The team over at Square have released a new open source debugging tool this week which makes use of the WebKit web inspector panel in Chrome to show details of the network requests that your iOS app is making in real time. Only limitation is that your network calls need to be based around the NSURLConnection classes but it's likely that even if you are using a 3rd party library like AFNetworking that it already uses NSURL under the covers.

Average App Store Review Times

We just relaunched a new version of our little crowd sourced App Store review times site this week. It still takes data from Twitter and reports the average duration of an App Store review but now it has trend information for both the current month and also across the whole year. If you look at the annual trend for the iOS store you can clearly see the spike in review time recently although it is falling back down again now which is great news. Full disclosure: This is a site run by me but I figured it was interesting enough that I would have linked to it had someone else created it.

Experimentation with build numbering

Paul Samuels experimenting with using Cocoa and MacRuby together to build a automatic iOS version number creation script from git history.

Code

An iPhone App Startup Performance Technique

Brent Simmons with a follow up to his previous article on 3 Rules of iOS Performance takes a deeper look at a couple of techniques he has used to speed up launching in the Glassboard app.

CFBag

NSHipster (and yes, a few weeks in the name still makes me smile) with a look at the ultimate hipster class, CFBag.

macOS Development

For AppKit, why does IB create a property that is assign, rather than retain?

If you are new to Mac development from an iOS background then this is an interesting Stack Overflow answer by Peter Hosey about a subtle but important difference between the two platforms regarding ownership of objects in nib files. It is also worth checking out the nib section in the Apple "Resource Programming Guide" for more information on how things have changed for iOS since the introduction of ARC.

Design

Play by Play: Neven Mrgan

I really like the Play by Play series by PeepCode and this week Geoffrey Grosenbach sits down with Neven Mrgan of Panic to design an iOS app. I find it really fascinating to watch and listen to the process that people go through when presented with a problem and this looks like a great episode.

Business and Marketing

How to get your first 1000 players

I liked Tyler York's take on the age old problem of marketing your iOS app or game and has some great tips on finding and talking to your early adopters.

The fall of Angry Birds

Trey Smith looks with an article on the phases that the App Store has been through so far. Phase 1 was Premium games, Phase 2 was Free to Play games. Trey takes a look at some of the crazy numbers the Free to Play games are doing and speculates on what Phase 3 of the App Store may be.

And finally...

Tweet from @qrush

This really should be a thing...