Issue 79

1^st February 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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Mobile Services lets you focus on building a great user experience instead of backend infrastructure. We make it easy to store data in the cloud, add user authentication via Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, or Google account, and send push notifications. All you need is ten minutes and about as many lines of code.

News

So this week saw the release of iOS 6.1 and Xcode 4.6. The new version of Xcode seems like a solid update but most interestingly it promises to finally fix code completion, so long NSStream and welcome back NSString. I miss Martin Pilkington’s expansive reviews of new Xcode versions, so much better than the release notes. Can we get a 4.6 review please Martin?

As you know I’m not usually one for speculation on new devices or hardware but if I were then I am sure I would find this article fascinating.

Tools

Kent Sutherland with a neat Xcode plugin which adds code completion for strings containing image names included within your project.

More image name help from Patrick Hughes, this time a small Python script to auto generate #define macros which insert a call to imageNamed: along with an assertion that the image actually exists in the app bundle. Not only does this give you code completion for image names but it also ensures that you don’t ship without including all the images which are referenced in code.

Like Richard Morton I would suggest just dropping armv6 support at this point but if that isn’t an option he has written up a great guide on how to build your app with the latest Xcode so that it can be submitted to the store which also includes an armv6 architecture binary which can’t be produced in Xcode 4.5+.

Code

I have never been a big fan of UIDatePicker on iOS, sure it’s functional but I think people prefer to pick dates with a calendar view style control. If you agree then you might be interested in this new control from Square which gives a beautiful multi-month calendar view as a date picker.

Interesting extension to Auto Layout from Martin Kiss which gives a potentially more readable way of creating Auto Layout constraints by creating attribute and rule objects to control things like insets, positioning, offsets, etc… It has a very readable syntax to it and I much prefer this to the visual format language supported natively.

Design

I wasn’t sure whether to put this in the code or design section but I picked design in the end. Jonathan Sibley has created a UITextField subclass specifically for email addresses which autocompletes the domain from either an included database of frequently used domains or from a custom data source. We should all be thinking about this kind of problem much more than we do when designing apps for tiny keyboards and small screens.

Courier Prime is a beautiful new take on the Courier font from John August. Originally designed for screenwriters but useful in many more situations than just screenwriting apps. It’s freely redistributable too which is always a nice surprise.

Business and Marketing

Ever wanted to create one of those clever HTML “videos” that Apple use on their site? You know the ones, a mixture of image sequences, HTML and JavaScript that can play in-place on an iPhone unlike a video which needs to launch a full screen player. Phosphor by Divergent Media is a new tool for creating these animations from a video file, very clever.

Videos

Ash Furrow talking at Tech Talks Toronto recently on balancing the Objective-C traditionalists with the Objective-C modernists covering accessibility, unit testing, automated UI testing, open source Objective-C code and CocoaPods along the way.

And finally...

What the hell did Einstein ever do that makes him such an authority? Did he ever make an app? Not as far as I know.