Issue 61

News

iOS 6 maps are better for applications

To buck the trend of the rest of the internet I am going to link to a post praising Apple's new maps rather than trashing them. Hal Mueller proposes that the new maps in iOS 6 look better in-app than the Google equivalent and from the screenshots here I have to agree.

Tools

Implementing Smart App Banners

I hadn't really looked into these auto-show banners on iOS 6 since the announcement that they would exist back at WWDC but this write up of how to implement them by David Smith explains all. Let's hope this puts an end to those horrid full screen HTML popup app adverts on sites.

Code

Coverflow with UICollectionView

Ole Begemann mentioned last week on Twitter that GitHub would soon be full of UICollectionViewLayout subclasses and Jonathan Wight took the baton this week and published an implementation of Coverflow as a UICollectionViewLayout subclass. Being able to craft these subclasses with ease is going to become a core iOS development skill over the next year so dig into the code and take a look at a real world example.

SKBounceAnimation

Soroush Khanlou with a nice little CAKeyframeAnimation subclass for easily implementing a wide range of bounce effects in your iOS apps. One for the Core Animation toolbox.

Deep-dive into CALayer Shadows

More Core Animation goodness from Kellen Styler. This is not a newly published article but I happened across it this week and it's a great run down of everything you might want to know about CALayer shadows.

Design

Subtle UI changes in iOS 6

I love looking at these UI comparison posts that invariably come out a few weeks/months after a new iOS release. Chris Armstrong has a detailed look at some of the changes that have been made across the whole of iOS. I agree that on the whole it's a gradual but noticable improvement but disagree about the new visuals on the dialer which I really don't like at all.

iOS 6: Automatic Selection of Last-Used Int'l Keyboard For Each Contact

More incredible attention to detail from Apple in iOS 6. This is one of those features that 90% of your user base are not even going to encounter or notice but those that do will love you forever for it.

Source Code Pro

Another redistributable font from Adobe. I am not sure it will tempt me away from Inconsolata but the fact that it is redistributable means it is surely worth a mention here.

Business and Marketing

Everything that’s wrong with the App Store in iOS 6

Chris Newman on the new App Store in iOS 6 which really do make apps more difficult to discover. I was pleasantly surprised when I first used the iOS 6 store during the beta (ooh, new shiny) but the flaws quickly became apparent. I really hope there are some improvements coming down the line in future iOS updates.

And finally...

Learnable Programming

Not related directly to iOS or Mac development (although it has some nice praise for Objective-C and Cocoa) but this article by Bret Victor on teaching programming and IDE design is wonderful.