Issue 84

8^th March 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Friday everyone! After attending NSConference this week I wanted to say thank you to everyone who introduced themselves and said hello while I was there, it was so great to meet you all. As for NSConference, it was a wonderful conference (as always) and is definitely worth a visit if you can get over to the UK next year. Dave

Dave Verwer

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News

Like Brent I am constantly frustrated with Auto Layout in Interface Builder constantly adding, changing and removing constraints and never quite getting it right. I have dealt with it so far by disabling Auto Layout completely in my new projects but Brent is suggesting here to instead reduce reliance on IB and use the alternate methods for specifying constraints. I am very much against moving away from Interface Builder but if I have to use Auto Layout for a project then I may consider doing this.

Tools

Ever wondered what changes when Xcode offers to update your project and build settings after an update? Keith Harrison has taken a quick look through the recommended updates that were introduced with Xcode 4.6.

While at NSConference this week, one of the stand out talks was from Evan Doll of Flipboard talking about the tools they use behind the scenes to build their iOS apps. One of the neatest tricks mentioned was a script they use to automatically overlay information about the build on top of the app icon. Krzysztof Zabłocki has written up a nice generic implementation of this ready to drop into your own projects.

Code

It’s an NSConference themed email this week mainly because it’s where I spent most of my week. Another highlight was Robert Wija’s talk about his open source styling framework for UIKit controls. Built on UIAppearance, it uses a plist format (rather than some of the CSS inspired projects that do similar) to specify the styling and I really like Robert’s approach to this problem.

Sam Vermette with a nice imageless version of the radiating map pin control seen in MapKit. It’s always nice to see artwork source files included in a project like this and in this case they are PaintCode files which is great if you want to customise the look and feel of the project.

Yichao Ji with an implementation of a ternary search tree in Objective-C. As mentioned in the readme for the project this makes a great companion to HTAutocompleteTextField which was mentioned back in Issue 79 of iOS Dev Weekly.

Justin Williams with a work in progress project to build composite image filters by specifying “recipes” in JSON. This should make it significantly easier to add that must have Hipstamatic inspired filter to your app. Quite an interesting name for the project too :)

One of the big downsides with custom drawRect: methods is that they are inaccessible by default and until Apple figures out how to translate CG drawing commands into a description of what is being drawn (come on Apple, what are you waiting for?) then we have to do a little extra work to add that metadata to our controls.

Design

This is an interesting one, a set of documents published by Scott Klein of ProPublica with a set of guidelines for presenting information in their apps. This is obviously focused on a “news” app but I think there are a couple of benefits of reading through this. There are some solid recommendations in here for all apps, but also this may set you thinking whether you need a similar kind of document for your app(s).

Business and Marketing

Bertrand Schmitt, CEO of App Annie speaking last year on the economics of the App Store. I missed this when it was first published but the extensive data they have collected means that this is a must watch and still very relevant today.

And finally...

No diff in the release notes this time (that was my favourite) but as always Loren Brichter pitches these perfectly.