Issue 68

16^th November 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

News

There are three lessons to learn here. 1. Don’t put piracy detection into your app, you have everything to lose and nothing to gain when it inevitably goes wrong. 2. If you ignored lesson one then don’t make your app auto-tweet a confession from a potentially innocent user. 3. If you ignore both of those lessons just apologise and be humble about it.

Good news for mogenerator users this week. Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch released an updated version with a scattering of new features and bug fixes.

Tools

After last week’s link to the SoundCloud UIActivity provider, Andrew Yates let me know about his site which holds a catalogue of all available UIActivity providers. If you know of one which is not listed here then drop him an email and get it listed.

I have written here many times about how much I prefer prototyping on paper to any of the software based solutions available but I may have found something here which bridges the gap between a paper prototype and a photoshop mock up. Take photos of your paper prototypes and create simple links between them.

Auto Layout is the one feature of 10.7 and iOS 6 that I really struggle to love (if you were ever a fly on the wall in our office you may hear a slightly more strongly worded version of that sentence). Matt Tancock takes a look at some of the biggest problems when using Auto Layout and Interface Builder together and suggests some solutions.

Code

Javier Soto with another take on Core Graphics drawing into cached UIImages that was mentioned last week. This super clean class renders drawing code into an image on a GCD queue and caches the result.

Automatic creation of RESTful web services by pushing up some Objective-C code into the cloud? Interesting idea. Who said Objective-C wasn’t suitable for server side code?

Mark Granoff on tracking down a subtle mistake while implementing protocol methods. It’s always surprising to me how many people don’t know about the ”-”, “space” feature of code completion which means you don’t need to enter the return type of a method to have it complete on known methods.

Design

Stu Maschwitz shows off his proof of concept video for how app switching could work on iOS when an external keyboard is in use. As iOS makes moves towards being a desktop replacement for more users I would love to see more attention paid to how it works with an external keyboard.

Business and Marketing

The App Store guidelines are very clear on this point stating that push notifications should not be used for direct marketing of any kind but it’s hard for them to tell what push is going to be used for during a review. Jeff Hunter has a good list of potential solutions which Apple could implement to help stop this.

And finally...

Egyptian Mode, Bag of Snakes and Papers to Grade are my favourites.