Issue 59

14^th September 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I hope you all managed to get your iPhone 5 pre-orders in this morning or late last night before they ran out of stock for the 21st. If you didn’t then maybe these links might be some kind of inadequate consolation prize. Happy Friday everyone.

News

With the release date for iOS 6 announced it is time to get submitting your compatible apps. Reading (and implementing) items on this checklist is a great way to give your app a bit of a better chance of being featured as well so pay attention.

Tools

I have linked to Code Pilot before but the developers have been kind enough to remove the requirement to expend items of currency in order to use it (I really can’t use the F word) this week so if you haven’t checked it out yet you should.

If you are lucky enough to have a Retina MacBook then you should grab this utility for taking 1x screenshots with it. The screen is rendered at 1x rather than scaling down a 2x image so you get images that look like they were taken at native 1x out of it.

Want to run Xcode without the huge toolbar but can’t live without the Scheme selector. Ole Zorn has produced a small plugin which places the Scheme selector in the title bar.

Ole Zorn again with another Xcode plugin for visualising (and picking) colours directly from within the code editor. Even better, both of these plugins also include full source code.

Code

So with the new 4” display announced yesterday I was hoping that there would be an ~ipad/~iphone style suffix naming convention for loading images for it. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be but in the resulting conversation on Twitter about it Ben Stahlhood’s useful category was linked and might come in handy until this is fixed.

Mattt continues his unbroken streak (this really is going to take some beating) and with this week’s project he has put together a block based wrapper around StoreKit for In-App Purchases. As I am sure many of you do, I have had my own class knocking around for doing this but this looks like a good, generic way to do it.

macOS Development

Some useful tips gathered by Craig Hockenberry during the seemingly painful update to xScope for the Mac Retina display.

Design

Peiter Buick for Smashing Magazine with a great article on pen/pencil sketching UI design ideas. My paper sketches are not even in the same class as his but I couldn’t agree more with this being the best way to get ideas for an app started and there are some great techniques in here to help you improve.

Business and Marketing

It’s easy to think that the questionable tactic of targeting digital goods and In-App purchases at kids is a new phenomenon but Mark Sorrell reminds us that this has been going on for a long time and that maybe what we need is a more visible, planned budgeting tool for kids rather than just blaming the companies. Mark gets extra credit from me for linking random images throughout his post as well.

And finally...

I wasn’t going to link to J2ObjC this week but it turns out I couldn’t resist this screenshot linked by Pete Steinberger. Enjoy.