Issue 75

Comment

Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all had a good break and are refreshed and ready to go for 2013. Dave.

News

iOS conferences and events in 2013

What better way to bring in the new year than a list of all the wonderful Mac and iOS conferences that are scheduled for this year. I can't believe how many events are listed here, just a few years ago a list like this would have been a very short read.

Fonts to help dyslexics read becomes a battle

I linked to Open Dyslexic in October last year but it has unfortunately been involved in some legal issues this week. If you are using or bundling Open Dyslexic you will want to read this one.

Tools

NSHipster Reader Submissions

I think NSHipster was my favourite Objective-C blog of last year and to celebrate the new year it published a collection of reader submissions. There are some useful tips in here and if you haven't subscribed to the blog yet then you are missing out.

NSRegexTester

Simple regex testing tool from Aaron Vegh based on NSRegularExpression so it should give accurate results when tested with regular expressions in Mac and iOS development.

RecordMyScreen

I had mixed results with this with the top section of the screen flickering on the recorded video but you may have better results. Obviously the red "recording" status bar would need replacing but that would be easy with a bit of ScreenFlow magic. I keep meaning to ask Don McAllister how he is capturing for iOS these days, I wonder if he might see this and give us some insight into his current iOS screencast workflow.

Code

BCGenieEffect

OS X genie style animation for UIView objects. I was interested to see how this was done so I took a quick look at the source and it looks like the view is being cut into a series of slices which are then scaled and animated along a path. Neat.

How to detect screenshots being taken

Grant Paul with an interesting one around a potential security risk in iOS apps, how to detect when a screenshot is being taken and hide sensitive information. I hadn't considered the security implications of this before but it's one to bear in mind.

DLIntrospection

Useful wrapper around objc/runtime.h from Denis Lebedev allows introspection of Objective-C classes. One for the debugging toolbox but the source to this is also useful as a practical guide to the runtime.h functions.

Design

Foldify

Krzysztof Zabłocki on the Cocos 2D blog with an interesting article on not including a "brush size" tool in Foldify. The end result is an extremely effective way to effectively change brush size by zooming and avoiding problems like having a brush which is smaller than the user's finger. For me, Foldify was easily my favourite app of last year and I am very pleased to see it getting so much coverage.

If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

Interesting discussion by Max Rudberg on guided walkthrough screens in iOS apps with responses/updates at the bottom by Phil Ryu of Clear. I am also not a huge fan of this style of walkthrough but appreciate that this is an extremely hard problem to solve for apps with very minimal UI.

Best of 2012: UI Animations

Beautiful Pixels has been doing a best of 2012 series over the last weeks or so and for me this was the most interesting post of them so far. Unsurprisingly, Letterpress makes the list which is good to see as it is pretty much a masterclass in beautiful UI interactions. Also interesting to see a Google iOS app make this list, I'm not sure that would have happened a couple of years ago.

And finally...

Connecting the dots: How my opinion made it into the New York Times

Nothing to do with iOS development but I really liked this post by Jason Fried and it certainly applies to software development as much as anything else.

Issue 75 January 4th 2013