Issue 62

News

New Apple Marketing Resources for iPhone 5

Matthew Panzarino noticed that Apple have published new marketing resources for the iPhone 5 along with a newly designed App Store badge for the iOS App Store. Developer login required.

Tools

AGImageChecker

Some of the nastiest performance problems I have come across on my travels have been caused by people using and scaling incorrectly sized images. AGImageChecker by Angel Olloqui is a small library which you can embed in debug builds to identify where images are being scaled (either up or down) by highlighting them with a coloured border. Such a great idea.

QuickRadar

Amy Worrall's QuickRadar tool which allows quick entry of bugs into Radar got an update this week. Best feature of the new version has to be automatic posting to OpenRadar so now we really don't have an excuse not to duplicate our bug reports there.

Shenzhen

Mattt Thompson is back again this week with a cute little command line tool for automating the building and distribution of apps through TestFlight.

Code

View Controller Lifecycle in iOS 6

Joe Conway on the Apple advice not to write viewDidUnload methods under iOS 6. That method always seemed a little janky to me so I was really pleased to see this change when it was announced and this is a great write up of the reasons behind it.

Remote View Controllers

Ole Begemann talking about a how Apple are using XPC to allow built in iOS UI (for example MFMailComposeViewController) into separate processes and speculating on how this could be used for inter-app communication on a future version of iOS.

Make your library enforce ARC

Great tip from Steven Fisher on forcing compilation errors for libraries which only support ARC.

Business and Marketing

The iPad 1

I agree with Marco Arment that this is the most likely reason for the dropping of iPad 1 support in iOS 6. It's a shame to see all those devices get left behind and I do think it will have an effect on the uptake stats of iOS 6 (on iPad of course, not iPhone) but things move on.

New Apple Developer Guideline Bans Apps That Promote Other Apps

John Gruber and TechCrunch on a new App Store guideline which bans linking to other apps. Like John, I really can't see much about this which was causing problems. Strange.

And finally...

[self note]

Paul Kim reminds us that we are smarter than we used to be but in the future we will still make ourselves look like idiots.