Issue 78

25^th January 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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URL shorteners like Bitly are a great tool to see how many clicks you get from a tweet, Facebook post or even an ad. But app developers also need to know how many of those visitors download the app. Taps.io fixes that, showing you the number of visits and app activations for each link you generate.

News

This post by Tom Dale can largely be summed up by asking for iOS 7 to have significantly better integration with the OS by using Google Now as a case study. I have been using an Android device a bit recently and I think that Google Now integration is the only thing I miss from it in iOS.

The Stanford iOS Development courses have been running for years now but this year sees a slight change with the addition of Piazza which allows you to to connect with and get feedback from the other people taking the course. What a wonderful resource we have here with this annually updated course on iOS development.

Tools

This is an awesome little tool from Paul Samuels which wraps his ruby gem for navigating the iOS simulator directories with an Alfred 2 beta extension to quickly manage the chaos which is the iOS simulator file system. No more looking through your Library folder for folders with UUIDs for names.

Interesting profiling tool by Robby Walker. Add a set of classes and/or selectors to a whitelist and get detailed performance statistics after executing your app. Definitely one to add to the debugging toolbox.

Another Ruby gem, this time from Gordon Fontenot which applies a set of default settings to an iOS project. Adding a .gitignore, turning on static analysis, increasing default warning levels, setting indentation and more. This should speed up your new project process no end.

Code

Roman Efimov has created a small media trimming control in the style of the ones used in the Camera and Voice Memo apps. Customisable by replacing the bundled images this could potentially be useful in quite a few different situations.

Arthur Sabintsev with a small class to notify users that they are using an out of date version of your app. I’m not sure that every app is appropriate for something like this but I certainly see this being very useful in certain situations. If you do decide to use this make sure to read the note about preventing these popups appearing during the review process as I would imagine that would be a great way to get a speedy rejection from the review team.

Core Data migrations are a notoriously tricky thing to get right and so should surely be a target for unit testing. Oliver Drobnik takes us on a recap of Core Data automatic migrations before delving into some code to unit test them.

Design

Louie Mantia with a great article on icon design with deconstructions some of Apple’s icons, improvements to others and on taking inspiration from real life when thinking about associating an app icon with the task at hand.

Videos

Ironically I just happened to be in Montreal on vacation while Çingleton was happening last year but I didn’t have a ticket so while I managed to join in on some chatter in the hotel bar I missed the content of the conference. Luckily along with the announcement of the dates for next year’s conference the organisers have released 5 session videos from last year.

And finally...

Shall I compare thee to a combine harvester…