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Issue 83

1st March 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

How to best use the web as an app developer

Is your app’s website neglected, or maybe even non-existent? Bring it to life with Tapstream’s web widget: it tells you which landing pages are best at converting users, which referring sites are driving activations and even where your most engaged users come from. Give it a go, no cost for indie devs.

News

Apple Rejecting Apps Using Cookie-Tracking Methods

I wasn’t aware that tracking users across apps using HTML 5 local storage had become a thing after uniqueIdentifier was deprecated but according to this article rejections are now being triggered for doing just that.


Beta versions apps and the App Store

Over five years after the launch of the App Store and we still don’t have an integrated way to send out beta/test versions of our apps. I really like Sean Heber’s view of how this could work (although I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for it to happen). If you agree, and want to make it more likely though you could go and dupe this radar.

Tools

Analysing iOS App Network Performances on Cellular/Wi-Fi

This article by Manbolo takes a look at four different methods of capturing networking data from your app to give you detailed information at the performance of your network code. It’s not the simplest of tasks but if you are trying to debug network performance problems then this is going to be an essential read.

Code

A potential pitfall of CGRectIntegral

Mark Pospesel with a gotcha when using CGRectIntegral along with some code to work around the issue. This post should also serve as a good reminder to always check your drawing code for misaligned views.


iCloud and That Sinking Feeling

There have been plenty of posts written recently about iCloud Core Data syncing issues and I don’t think I am going to link to any more of those. However this article by Ben Lachman and Robert Cantoni takes a slightly different look at some of other considerations around adopting iCloud for syncing. I don’t see these issues in the same league as the reliability issue but certainly these are things to think about before using iCloud.


Friday Q&A 2013-02-22: Let’s Build UITableView

Matthew Elton takes the reins for the Friday Q&A this week with a look at implementing UITableView from scratch. The sample code provided has options to toggle the cell reuse optimisation which gives a glimpse of how life could have been without the reuse pool technique used by UITableView.


THIn

Cute little abstraction of dispatch_after by Jamie Montgomerie. In 3 seconds, use this code.

Business and Marketing

Making a Hit Tower Defense Game: A Top App Dev Interview

A new series of posts over on Ray Wenderlich’s site interviewing app developers begins with Pablo Ruiz interviewing Alvaro Azofra on how their game Kingdom Rush came into existence and managed to stay high in the charts.


Cheat Sheet for Pitching your iOS App

This infographic by Tope Abayomi gives some useful tips on how to write the perfect pitch email when trying to get your app noticed by the review sites.

Books

All The Image IO You Need to Know

After publishing “All The C You Need to Know” a couple of weeks ago, Bill Dudney has turned his attention to Image IO this time. Even though the title of this book might indicate a cursory glance over the topic there is actually a wealth of really in depth technical information in here on one of the most important topics for iOS developers, dealing with Images in all their forms.

And finally...

Happy Birthday, Objective-C

Graham Lee with a look at the birth and early history of Objective-C.