Issue 76

11^th January 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

It’s likely that you came across this news already as it has been widely reported but as of two days ago you are unable to update iOS app screenshots in iTunes Connect without also uploading a new binary. I am linking to Don McAllister’s post here as he has investigated a little more and found that Newsstand apps are exempt from this restriction which is good news as you really don’t want to have to upload a new app with each issue. If you are wondering why this happened, read the link from Panic which Don links to at the start of his article.

Obviously not directly related to iOS development but this will be an interesting experiment to watch as this is an often requested feature for the App Store. As I have said before, I’m not sure this is the right solution to this problem but it should be fascinating to watch what happens.

Tools

This useful video of Mike Hay presenting at Cocoaheads is a great run down of some common (and some not so common) debugging tips for iOS and Mac apps. Worth a watch.

New case study on the ImageOptim site reducing the size of the TweetBot package from 33Mb to 16Mb. It would be fantastic if there was a command line version of this so it could be easily integrated into an Xcode build process. I had a quick dig in the bundle and found all of the individual optimiser binaries but couldn’t find one that to wrap up the full process like the app does.

Another option for reducing the size of your app bundle by Nick Lockwood. I hadn’t heard of JPNG before but this looks really interesting for large background images which still need alpha transparency.

Web based tool to place an iOS screenshot onto a variety of devices in real world situations. The screenshots look slightly out of place as they naturally haven’t been adjusted to match the lighting of the original photo but this is a neat little tool nonetheless.

Code

Mike Abdullah with a potentially nasty situation of KVO being fairly broken for weak properties. I think KVO could really do with a bit of love soon with issues like this and what feels like a very outdated syntax against more modern Objectve-C APIs.

Ever wanted to customise the colour of a popover background? Gordon Hughes has the answer with what looks to be a very capable replacement for UIPopoverBackgroundView.

Tomek Kuźma with a class to help when you need more control than cornerRadius can give you.

macOS Development

It doesn’t seem like two years since the Mac App Store debuted and to mark the anniversary Federico Viticci has written a comprehensive retrospective on the story so far.

Design

Interesting question and subsequent answer by Mervin Johnsingh about the phrasing of error messages. Of course, it depends on the app but I think injecting a bit of humanity into error messages would usually be a positive thing.

And finally...

Wonderful couple of posts from Don Melton who started the Safari and WebKit projects in 2001. Check out part two as well which was posted yesterday, great stories.