Issue 64

19^th October 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

News

Congratulations to Mattt and all of the other contributors getting AFNetworking to 1.0 500 days after being first announced. I think I have mentioned here a few times that I tend not to use many third party libraries but AFNetworking has become the solid exception to that rule.

Tools

This list of essential software from Justin Williams reads quite similarly to my own but there were a few tools which I had not heard of before that sounded useful. Notably Patterns for dealing with Regular Expressions and Iconslate for easily creating the new iconset format for OS X.

Code

It seems that the lack of interface customisation with UIPageControl finally got to Jerry Jones and prompted him to create this much more customisable version. It is API compatible so it should be simple to drop in if you are looking for some more visual options for your rows of dots.

This super clean class from Eloy Durán provides a great way to quickly render out tinted assets (with caching) from either PNG or PDF source files.

If there is one area that we could all improve on in our apps it probably be error handling. This post by James Beith of Realmac Software explains the idea behind their newly open sourced block based error recovery code.

This Passbook tutorial from Jonathan Tang gives a nice step by step walk through of all of the different steps for getting an app Passbook enabled including everything you need to do in iTunes Connect as well.

If you are new to Objective-C and just getting started with threading you may have wondered what the @synchronized keyword was for? Steve Vlaminck published a overview of the essentials to get you started.

Design

Not specifically iOS related but even as developers on this platform I believe we should all have a good working knowledge of typography. I like to consider myself quite typography aware and I still learned quite a bit from this article. Good stuff.

An updated version of the always excellent iOS UI elements PSD from Teehan + Lax. Thankfully they have made the file a little smaller this time which should help those of us not loading it on a Mac Pro with 32Gb RAM.

Business and Marketing

This excellent article by Jamie Madigan digs into the psychology beind each of the tricks to keep people playing (and buying currency) in SimCity Social. I had not come across Jamie’s blog before but the articles he links from each of the sections are also worth a read if you have time.

And finally...

A bit of fun from Cameron Banga of 9magnets around the Apple’s “little” event next week. Take a guess at the device specs and any other announcements at the event.