Issue 73

Comment

I hope you are all going to follow the example of iTunes Connect over the next week or two and take a well deserved break, I know I certainly am. So, as with last year I am going to be taking a week off from iOS Dev Weekly next week which means this is the last issue of iOS Dev Weekly for this year.

Thanks to everyone for subscribing and reading this year and thanks especially to everyone who has written a blog post, article, open source code, business or design advice or anything else I have linked to. I hope you all have a great time over the holidays and I'll see you next year! Dave.

News

App Store Review Times Fall Drastically

This seems to happen every year just before the iTunes shutdown but I am pleased to say that both Mac and iOS App Store review times seem to be in really good shape right now. The peak averages of ~11 days for iOS and ~27 days for OS X seem like a distant memory. Let's hope they stay this way after the store opens back up in the new year.

The Impact of Google Maps on iOS 6 Uptake

Even though we generally enjoy very good rates of adoption of major new versions of iOS it seems like there is always something holding it back a little. Good news is that Google Maps may have had given iOS 6 a nice boost. As always, you should measure your own stats for this kind of thing rather than relying totally on figures from other apps but the sense I get is that the release of Google Maps is going to be good news for us all.

Tools

Transformifier

This is a great idea. Struggling to get those 3D transforms looking right in your app? Erwin Mazariegos has developed an in-app 3D transformation tweaking tool which can be added to any CALayer and allows tweaking of the CATransform3D. There is a demo app included if you want to have a quick play with it. I expect a sharp decrease in arm waving and contortion in iOS development offices around the world as people stop trying to visualise 3D transformations using arms and hands.

SyncSpace

Shareable multi user sketching on an enormous zoomable canvas. Since SketchShare was unfortunately removed from the App Store earlier this year I have been waiting for a replacement for it to come along and this looks like it might be it.

Code

Slash

As glad as I am that we have NSAttributedString on iOS now, creating them can still be a bit longwinded. Chris Devereux has created this handy class for super simple markup based creation of attributed strings with easily specified styles for each markup tag.

GVUserDefaults

I don't know about you but I always write a class to encapsulate my NSUserDefaults access but it's always written custom for each project and while it isn't hard to do it is dull, repetetive code. GVUserDefaults is a simple class that you can subclass and add @dynamic properties to to automatically read/write defaults. No primitive type support as yet but you can still add your own properties so it's not a huge problem.

STTweetLabel

UILabel subclass from Sebastien Thiebaud which can highlight and provide interactivity around hash tags, @usernames and URL links. The clue is in the name as to what this was originally intended for but these conventions are used across a large number of services now. Useful.

Friday Q&A: Objective-C Pitfalls

It's been a while since I linked to a Friday Q&A but I found this one particularly interesting. A great article on some common (and not so common) pitfalls to avoid or at least be aware of when writing Objective-C.

Design

Making Crisp Retina Icons for your App

Good advice from Dan Wood on producing retina artwork. This problem will largely go away as the whole world turns retina but we have a long way to go there and sometimes it isn't as simple as a quick resize.

Business and Marketing

My Sales & Experience in the Education App Market - 2012 Report

This detailed report from L'Escapadou on their performance over the past year selling educational apps on iOS. There are some good nuggets of information in there we can all use as well and it's always nice to hear about an independent developer doing this well on the App Store.