Issue 66

2^nd November 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Great news this week with Apple allowing In-App purchase and Game Center metadata to be uploaded/amended using their command line transporter tool. I couldn’t find anyone talking about it that I could link to yet but if you are a registered developer, you should probably check out the email that you received a couple of days ago.

Happy Friday everyone.

News

The results are in on Ray Wenderlich’s recent poll on the most useful third party iOS libraries, judged by an the authors and readers of Ray’s blog and an esteemed set of guest judges. Congratulations to the authors of the winning libraries.

This happened last week but just in case you missed it Apple have adjusted the prices of the App Store tiers again to reflect the changing currency rates around the world. This article by Joerg Schwieder takes a look at what changed in the reshuffle.

Tools

Updated this week for iOS 6 and 4.5, Daniel Steinberg’s offcial companion book to the Stanford University iOS lecture course is now available on iBooks. The Stanford courses remain a great resource for learning iOS development and this book can only help make them even better.

Code

If you have ever tried to write map annotation clustering code you are probably aware that it isn’t as simple as it first seems. Luckily the kind folk over at Applidium have released a library to solve this problem, ADClusterMapView is open source and seems to have a very simple API to boot.

This looks like a great library from Glen Low for working with zip files. Extracting, creating and even amending an existing zip file all without needing to stray from the comfort of Objective-C. Great stuff.

Design

Lukas Mathis on the topic of scrolling vs pagination for reading apps. I liked Michael Tsai’s point about scrolling giving too much control compared to pagination. Isn’t it ironic that iBooks 3 got scrolling support last week.

Business and Marketing

App discovery for new apps remains a big issue across the various App Stores and choosing smart keywords is one of only a few choices you have for ranking a little higher when people are searching. Drew McCormack has some great advice on tackling the problem.

Kevin Hoctor with some good advice on marketing or making real Texan chilli, I’m not entirely sure which.

And finally...

A million monkeys bashing on a million touch screens, literally…