Issue 72

14^th December 2012

Written by Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

Whether you’re building an enterprise app that needs annotations and text highlighting or a Newsstand magazine with page curl transitions, PSPDFKit can help. Highly customizable, PSPDFKit solves all the common problems and implementation details with PDF files, letting you focus on the important parts of your app.

News

It was impossible to miss the news about the new Google Maps app this week but you may have missed that it also came with a new SDK for integration with 3rd party apps. Seems like it provides very similar functionality to MapKit with the only notable addition being that you have access to tilting to give the 3D maps that both Maps and Google Maps provide.

New from Apple this week, system status of all the main Apple and iCloud systems. The only thing I would like to see added to this is the status of iTunes Connect.

Tools

With GDB soon to be removed completely from the default Xcode installation now is as good a time as ever to dig into LLDB a bit more. If you have been avoiding LLDB this quick guide to the basics of LLDB by Matt Long might be what you are looking for.

Code

Chris Miles with a port of the $1 Unistroke Recogniser completely encapsulated in a UIGestureRecognizer. Easy to use too, all that is needed is a path with the shape you want to recognise passed to the recogniser. The demo works really well and when I looked there was a surprisingly small amount of code in the recogniser which is testament to both Chris and the original authors of the algorithm.

Interesting library from Zynga which could really help out if you are splitting code/functionality between a native app and a web view. For example, physics engine in native code controlling objects in a web view DOM.

Fun experiment from Wade Cosgrove of Panic on recreating the algorithm used in iTunes 11 for determining effective UI colours from Album art. I wonder if we will see an explosion of this being used in iOS apps now that iTunes 11 has provided a bit of inspiration.

I wrote my first non-trivial UICollectionViewLayout subclass recently and so I was really pleased to see this tutorial by Bryan Hansen published this week. It is a fairly comprehensive, step by step look at building up a collection view with a custom layout. Useful if you haven’t tackled one yet.

macOS Development

Apple published fairly extensive documentation for the SceneKit framework on Mac OS X this week. I really hope we see this on iOS one day, maybe in iOS 7? Fingers crossed.

Cabel Sasser explaining the changes that were needed for a sandboxed version of Coda for the Mac App Store. I thought this was interesting for two reasons really. First it’s the first high profile Mac app that I know of that had a pre-sandboxing build in the App Store build choosing to move to sandboxing in order to add features. But also, this is a great lesson in customer communication, clear and to the point with good explanation of why the changes are happening.

Design

I am a sucker for sites like this. In the same veins as Pttrns and Mobile Patters, UX Archive takes a slightly deeper look at the apps that it features, broken down by task. I would really like to see some commentary (ideally by the original designer) next to these sets of screenshots. Even without though, there is some good stuff here.

I couldn’t decide if this belonged in the Code or Design sections of the email. Twitter, Facebook, Email and a few other icons implemented as UIBezierPath objects. I wonder if PaintCode was used to create these?

Business and Marketing

This is interesting. Looks like they are running the iOS simulator and piping the output through to a HTML canvas. Certainly creates an impressive demo experience for your marketing site but I do wonder how this will scale and remain profitable.

Videos

Good collection of session videos from the recent Handheld conference which was held in Cardiff recently. I would imagine the remainder of the sessions will be posted over the next few weeks but there is already some excellent content here.

And finally...

I couldn’t resist linking this as it is exactly what I did yesterday.