Issue 82

22^nd February 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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Waza celebrates craft and the creative process of software development with technical sessions and interactive artistic happenings. Speakers include Mattt Thompson, Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto, Michael Lopp (a.k.a Rands), and Kirby Ferguson of “Everything is a Remix”. Use the code “moving-mobile-13” for a $50 discount.

News

This was announced last week but I wasn’t sure what to think about it so I didn’t link it, one week on and I think I have even less idea what I think but I can tell you that it was very nearly the “And Finally…” link for this week. This tool from Intel will attempt to convert XIB files to HTML/CSS and Objective-C to JavaScript, yes, you read that correctly. It’s in beta and of course does not support 100% for all of iOS. I wasn’t able to try it myself as it needs Windows 8 and Visual Studio but it’s an interesting read.

This new release of the Google Maps API for iOS has some new features such as better support for polylines and overlays but the bigger news is that API keys are no longer being limited and can be freely created for any app now.

Tools

Ole Begemann with a useful script for creating and updating .strings files from your nib/xib/storyboard files when working with the new base localisation feature of iOS 6 and OS X 10.8. add this script to your build process and always up to date string files will be yours.

New Mac OS X IDE for Mono Touch from Xamarin and from the video it looks pretty capable with decent code completion and debugger support. If you are writing with Mono Touch then I would imagine you will want to check this out.

Code

I hadn’t come across this useful set of collection helpers from Rob Rix before but I spotted him talking about some updates to it this week and had a look. Super easy mapping, folding and filtering of collections.

James Beith with a detailed look at working with dates and times in your iOS and OS X apps starting with the basics, going through parsing and formatting and ending up with the difference between YYYY and yyyy which you never know, might save some nasty bug one day.

Talking of dates, Anton Bukov has a lovely little UI component which takes the style of the iOS calendar view and gives it some features to be used as a picker control. Zoom out from days to months, then to years or a nice one week view.

macOS Development

If you develop for OS X then I am sure you will be familiar with this problem but even if you don’t then it is likely that you have seen multiple copies of apps appear on the Open With menu over time. This quick bash alias from Dr. Drang uses launch services to clean everything up and leave your menus without dupes.

Design

New font for use in wireframes if you are fed up of filling your mockups with latin. Simple idea but I really like how this looks when inserted into a wireframe.

Business and Marketing

This is a fascinating bit of research by Dave Addey. I knew that there were not 155 separate App Store storefronts and sets of featured apps but I had never looked into how things were split. Some interesting findings in here.