Issue 67

9^th November 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

News

No surprises here but Apple have confirmed their annual iTunes Connect shutdown at the end of December. All the usual rules apply and you shouldn’t be scheduling updates or price changes during that time unless you want your app to disappear for a few days.

Tools

iOS is over 5 years old now and as more devices get released it can be hard to keep track of the hardware inside them. Blake Patterson has put together a handy table of all the (known) hardware for all currently released iOS devices. As someone who has had search for these kind of facts and figures before some of this information is surprisingly hard to find so this is going on my permanent list.

On almost the same subject, Richard Stelling takes a more iOS version focused look at the same problem with an update to his iOS version support matrix PDF. I wouldn’t usually link to two things which are so similar in the same issue but both of these tools contain super useful information.

Code

CouchDB style local NoSQL database from Jens Alfke using SQLite for underlying storage. Can be used purely for local storage or but also supports replication to CouchDB instances. There is a demo app available as well if you want to have a play.

Nick Bona with an interesting blog post about creating a custom UIActivity. The implementation here is obviously quite specific to SoundCloud but you might find it an interesting code sample if you are thinking of implementing your own UIActivity subclass.

Interesting idea from David Keegan to use a tool like PaintCode to generate drawing code which is then cached to bitmaps at runtime in an attempt to try and reduce the ever increasing size of our app bundles (amongst other things) while retaining efficient rendering.

Ever struggled with testing your networking in an app? This newly release library from Luis Solano, Nocilla is a very clean library for stubbing HTTP requests in your unit tests. Problem solved.

Design

Not being involved in much animation before coming to iOS development I hadn’t heard of Disney’s 12 principles of animation before reading this wonderful article by Rachel Hinman for Smashing Magazine. The article goes through all of the relevant principles with examples from mobile apps. If you read one post from this week’s issue, make it this one.

Still my favourite text editor for writing, iA Writer for Mac had a new release this week. Oliver Reichenstein talks about resisting the temptation of taking every feature request and adding it to a to-do list and it is rare to see this level of thought over a feature like this. This article is not spceific to iOS development but the techniques and discussion should still be interesting.

Another example of painstaking attention to detail, Chris Dannen for Fast Company takes a detailed look at the design process (and maths) behind the new colour mixing feature in Paper, released this week.

Business and Marketing

This was a great episode of iDeveloper live. Scotty and John Fox talk with Steve Sande and Erica Sadun from TUAW about how to get your app noticed by a large blog like TUAW. It’s a lengthy chat but there is some great information in here.

And finally...

An impressive collection, can anyone beat this? Note: Android developers are not eligible for this challenge.