Issue 77

18^th January 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

I mentioned that COPPA was planning to fine app developers who do not have their privacy policies in order a few weeks ago in Issue 71. This week a new report PDF has been published by the California Department of Justice giving detailed advice on how to implement their recommendations. If you didn’t check into this a few weeks ago then you should do it now.

Tools

I haven’t played with uncrustify for a while but when I did investigate it by far the biggest issue was finding and configuring the plethora of options that it has in its config files. Ryan Maxwell has tackled the problem head on by writing a Mac app to configure and preview uncrustify configurations.

The possibility of being able to create plugins for Xcode is always going to be something that gets us developers excited. In this episode of the excellent Edge Cases podcast Andrew Pontious and Wolf Rentzsch go through a fairly comprehensive list of reasons why official support for Xcode plugins is not likely to happen alongside an interesting discussion of the development history of Xcode.

Code

Mark Dalrymple on using dispatch_once for something other than creating a singleton. GCD really is a great framework when you need a little more control of your async operations.

Vladimir Grichina following up on Mike Abdullah’s post from last week with some code to swizzle around with NSObject to warn when KVO’ing a weak property. One to consider for the debug build of your project.

Business and Marketing

I really love this story of New York Times app columnist, Bob Tedeschi going undercover to write an article on how hard it is to write a successful iOS app and ending up topping the charts with it and winning an Apple Design Award.

Possibly the most asked question about marketing on iOS. This list shouldn’t have any big revelations in it as you read it but it is pretty much the correct answer to this question. Doing everything on the list successfully is the hard part though.

Books

I think many people who started writing Objective-C without previously having written much or any C have a slight fear of the C language. Bill Dudney has decided to try and fix this problem by writing this book. If you have been secretly afraid of the C in Objective-C, this book is definitely worth adding to your collection.

And finally...

Surprising how little it has changed in 15 years.