Issue 69

23^rd November 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Thanksgiving if you were celebrating it yesterday, how about some links to go with the leftover turkey?

Dave Verwer

News

Turns out I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want those awesome features (and yes, that phrase annoyed me every time). I suppose the decline of this type of network was fairly inevitable after Game Center got going. I just did a quick check on plus+ as well and while it looks like it still is active I can’t imagine it has a bright future on iOS.

Tools

Super smart new Mac app from Padraig Kennedy and Oisin Prendiville. Generate iTunes Connect promo codes, manage who you sent them to and track when they get redeemed. This has always been fairly painful manual process so I am really pleased to see this launch.

Code

A Pinterest style “waterfall of images” style UICollectionView layout from Nelson, useful directly if you need this style of view or for education if you haven’t dug into how a custom collection view layout is built yet. I am surprised there haven’t been more of these layout classes popping up. Maybe I missed some?

We haven’t had much low level content here in a while but this Friday Q&A should make up for that. Mike Ash takes an in depth look at the buggiest of all functions, objc_msgSend.

Ever wanted to know what the Gunning Fog score for a piece of text was? This is a niche one but this NSString category by Ryan Nystrom implements Dave Child’s text-statistics which gives various readability statistics.

Logan Collins with a little experiment to visualise the face detection features available as part of Core Image. It’s easy to forget that we have access to this powerful feature.

macOS Development

It seems it might be niche week on iOS Dev Weekly this week with Graham Lee for iDeveloper TV takes a look at developing a privileged helper app for OS X. Not something you will need to do every day but it’s always good to learn something new.

I love this implementation of a standard OS X style preferences window from Vadim Shpakovski. Just drop it in and create view controllers for each preference tab, could you ask for anything simpler?

And finally...

Nice analogy from Vlad Lokshin.