Issue 70

30^th November 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

News

Chris Miles tweeting about the recent presentation by Doug Gregor of Apple to introduce modules to the C language and solve some of the problems with header files. This link is directly to the slide deck which gives a good overview of the plans, exciting times.

New iOS/Mac focused podcast by Guy English and Rene Ritchie. I had this on my list last week but I hadn’t had a chance to listen to it but I fixed that this week and this sounds like it is going to be a keeper.

Tools

A gem of a tip from Geppy Parziale on using the DTPerfomanceSession framework in your iOS app to send signals to Instruments at specific points during execution. It’s no wonder I hadn’t come across this framework before as the only mention of it anywhere in the documentation is a brief mention in the Instruments 4.0 release notes but this post makes me wonder what else it can do.

Track search rankings across multiple terms in the App Store as well as tracking chart rankings, etc… Given the prevalence of services like this for web apps I am surprised I haven’t seen this type of service for the App Store before.

Code

I am sure we have all created some utility helpers for doing this type of thing before but this class written by Sebastian Rehnby provides a great, animation aware category for performing various types of adjustments to view frames (moving, resizing, centering and aligning).

This is a great explanation of how explicit CAAnimation animations work from Ole Begemann. Overriding the implicit animations is a great technique that I don’t see used often enough, not perfect for every situation but this post could remove a large number of uses kCAFillModeForwards from the world.

This is an interesting one from Justin Spahr-Summers, a library to extend Objective-C to explore some new language features. Important to note that he calls this a proof of concept rather than something you should be using in production code but the ideas in here are certainly very interesting.

Reda Lemeden with more talk on the pros and cons of pre-rendered assets vs Core Graphics drawing. Reda suggests using a hybrid approach of using Core Graphics to render resizable assets. Also check out the comment on the post from Andy Matuschak of Apple for some clarification on off screen rendering.

More UIActivity goodness from Simon Whitaker, this time a Dropbox SDK aware activity.

Business and Marketing

Trent Hamm with a review of a great book. Not specific to iOS but as Trent says, “Every time you write anything, you’re selling something.” and this is certainly true for us writing iOS apps. It’s something we may not always be the best at but is something I always try and think about when writing.

Christian Donlan for Eurogamer with a look back at five years of iOS gaming, talking about a skeptical article he wrote as the App Store first launched but how overcoming the challenges of a purely touch screen gaming device has actually shaped mobile gaming as we know it today. I really enjoyed this.

And finally...

I think this was just a cheap ploy by Mike Abdullah to increase his count by one. Well played Sir…