Issue 81

15^th February 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Awwwww, shucks… If there is one thing I want this year it’s an App Store of some sort for the Apple TV. I was suckered by this one for a few hours but Jim Dalrymple quickly calmed me down. I’m still hoping for a “Yep” at some point this year though.

Tools

DTrace has always been a extremely powerful tool but one that many people (including me) know very little about. Mark Dalrymple gives us a nice overview of what it can do along with a couple of specific use cases for it. Mark also followed up on this with a Part 2 post as well so if you want more you should check that out as well.

I have been aware of this for a little while now but I don’t think I have ever linked to it. Nicolas Seriot keeps a wonderful resource of always up to date exports of the current iOS framework headers, both public and private. This is a useful resource to keep handy.

Code

Josh Abernathy with a post on Functional Reactive Programming and ReactiveCocoa. I am not sure I am convinced on this yet but I am a firm believer that it’s always worth looking at alternative approaches to problems and so this is worth a read. Reactive Cocoa also hit v1.0 this week so reading this post might give you a good opportunity to check it out if you have not already.

Yari D’areglia with a well written article on subclassing UIControl to create your own iOS custom control. Some good stuff in here, I especially liked the technique of using a dynamic layer mask to create a cute little glow effect for the control.

So it looks like Pete Steinberger has been implementing UIAppearance proxy support in PSPDFKit this week and has written about a couple of gotchas if you are looking to support it in your own custom view classes.

Are you always forgetting how to find the mid point of a CGRect? Or how to convert between coordinate systems? Then Adam Knight has a handy diagram and some examples of CGGeometry for you.

Design

A langthy, thoughtful discussion on flat design vs realistic design from Sacha Greif. I feel like we may have talked about this enough recently and there are good arguments on both sides but Sacha makes a few points that I haven’t seen covered before and I really enjoyed this post.

A small reminder from Geoffrey Pullum and Lukas Mathis about trying to cut down on the jargon. It’s so easy to slip up when designing something as you are so familiar with the subject matter that you sometimes don’t even see your mistake. In my experience error messages are the easiest place to slip up and overload with jargon.

Business and Marketing

If there is one feature of other mobile app stores which I am very jealous of it’s the ability to have trial/demo versions of apps. Amy Worrall has a proposal for how it might work and I love it, especially the custom status bar which would be a nice trigger to push people back to the App Store to make that purchase while they are using (and hopefully loving) your app.

A new report published at the end of January by Distimo on the effect that discounting your apps can have on revenues. I was a little surprised at first that discounts/price changes are most effective on iPhone rather than iPad but after thinking about my buying habits, I can see it.

And finally...

A fascinating slice of history.