Issue 63

12^th October 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Friday everyone. I have been on vacation for the last two weeks so I was a little unsure whether I would be able to get both these issues out but the free and plentiful WiFi of North America has been kind to me and so your normal service has been uninterrupted.

News

This week Twitter open sourced their recently acquired A/B testing library, Clutch. I believe that A/B testing will become a much larger part of iOS development as the move to more and more in-app purchases continues and we have to ensure that our purchasing processes are effective so this is probably something you should be looking into.

A new series of short video podcasts from iDeveloper TV. The first episodes were filmed at the iOS Dev UK conference earlier this year and the first one is a great interview with Evan Doll of Flipboard. There is another episode there with some guy talking about a weekly newsletter but I would stick with the Evan Doll interview if I were you.

Tools

This has been around for quite a while now but I came across it again this week and it occurred to me that I haven’t mentioned it here yet. HandleOpenURL is a great resource which catalogues all (or at least most of) of the native and third party URL schemes available on iOS.

James Dempsey with a useful technique for measuring how effectively you are able to test across the full range of released iOS devices. Mark the models/operating systems that you have access to with a star and get an overview of how effective your on-device testing currently is.

Code

The investigation into remote view controllers has continued this week and Ole Begemann has a good round up of the progress made so far. I am hopeful that this will be used for easier communication between third party apps in iOS 7 but we will have to wait and see.

Oliver Letterer has a fun collection of Objective-C runtime utilities including a cute method swizzling helper which uses a block to provide the new method implementation. Naturally you should use this with the all of the usual caution that you already use when swizzling.

macOS Development

So we hit the news a little this week with several stories about the steadily increasing Mac App Store review times triggered by data from our review times site. I have always been a defender of the App Store review processes and so I am really sad to see things get as bad as this but a month waiting for review really is too long.

Design

An open and freely redistributable font which makes reading easier for people with dyslexia. If you build an app which has a lot of text and already includes a choice of fonts then you should probably consider including this font in your bundle to make it more accessible.

And finally...

Great post by Lee Winder on defining and dealing with negative developers within a software development team. This is a really tough problem to have but extremely common as a development team grows but Lee has some good suggestions on how to deal with it.