Issue 71

7^th December 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Just a quick note from me this week that in addition to the regular email content there will now be a single, clearly marked sponsored link in each future issue of iOS Dev Weekly. Just like the regular content, these links will always be relevant to iOS development as they are being hand curated by me rather than coming from any kind of ad network. Happy Friday everyone and on with the links… Dave

Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

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News

This is an interesting one. Time to check your privacy policies are in order and to make sure you link to them from your apps. iTunes Connect has had a field for a privacy policy for a long time now but it is often empty. I know we have apps that don’t link to ours, this one is going straight on my todo list.

Following up on last week’s link to the slide deck from this presentation, the video has now been published which provides a much better way to find out the details of this proposal for the C language. I wish I had waited a few days before linking to the slides last week.

Tools

There are some useful git tips and techniques in this article on git from Nicola Paolucci. I especially liked the idea of creating a completely empty commit as the first one in a project so you can have unrelated branches (his example of this is a good one, starting a gh-pages branch).

Jonathan Penn with a interesting use of Instruments and UIAutomation. Write a script to navigate through your app and take screenshots at the appropriate places. Then run the script for all resolutions and localisations. This will be a huge timesaver if you create localised screenshots.

Code

How do I feel about this one? Conflicted. I am usually suspicious of libraries where you need to adopt a full new set of controls as you have the potential to lose things like accessibility support and risk introducing a slew of edge case bugs. However this library by Tom Benner is worth a look because he is just subclassing the UIKit controls and adding styling using pretty solid iOS techniques and it does have the potential to remove a lot of UI code.

Neat little set of classes for cleaner KVO and simple bindings by Jamie Montgomerie. Every time I write observeValueForKeyPath: I think I should write something like this. The good news is that now I don’t have to because Jamie did.

There has been a fair bit of talk over the last few issues about UIActivity. Even though this is going to attempt to stay away from becoming UIActivity weekly, I wanted to link to this post by Mariano Abdala on designing a better UIActivity API which might save you a little time and code when implementing your own activities.

Auto Layout ported back to iOS 5? Coded for relaxation (yes, really) after shipping an app by Rolandas Razma this is an interesting experiment which might be useful if you are supporting iOS 5. I remain completely unconvinced on Auto Layout myself but if you are in that set of Auto Layout lovers this may be of interest.

Design

How this is still a problem after 13 major version releases of Photoshop is a story that needs telling but if you find yourself cursing at the Photoshop rounded rectangle tool this little script by David Jensen may come in useful.

This is a great set of real world tips for Photoshop by Rakesh K, I learned quite a few useful techniques while reading this. My favourite was the tip on creating shadow shape layers and warping them. You don’t want to know how I have been doing that until now…

Business and Marketing

After the piracy/tweeting fiasco I linked to a couple of weeks ago with terrible failed apology, I wanted to link this apology from David Barnard of AppCubby. We all hope that we never need to apologise for things going wrong but everyone makes mistakes and this is an extremely well written apology. Clear, humble and to the point about what went wrong and more importantly what is going to be done to make it right. We can all learn from reading this.

And finally...

Or, maybe the joke is on us and this is the secret to getting featured in the App Store.