Issue 88

5^th April 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

Michael Jurewitz released a superb series of posts this week on App Store pricing, this five part series is a distillation of his recent talks at NSConference and Çingleton on the same subject and are essential reading for anyone interested in making money on the store. This is a link to part one of the series of posts but there are five in total so don’t forget to click through the “Newer” link at the bottom for the others. Solid gold.

Tools

I was going to describe this as a new platform from Heroku for building a back end service for your iOS app but in reality this is simply the final piece of a puzzle which has been in progress for a while now. Helios is a collection of iOS client and server libraries for easily building a back end to your app. Obviously focused on Heroku as a default deployment platform but portable across your own servers if you want to deploy that way as well. Mattt has been a busy boy.

There are plenty of introductory Jenkins articles around (some of which I have linked to in the past) but this post from Richard Buckle goes much further than the basics with plenty of tips and solutions for the issues you will find along with a good overview of the plugins that you should (and shouldn’t) use.

If you haven’t checked out CocoaPods yet then this introductory tutorial from Bart Jacobs would be a good place to start. I must admit that I am not aboard the CocoaPods train yet but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be.

Code

Everyone loves a top 10 don’t they? Well this one from Ole Begemann is a good set of tips to make working AutoLayout more bearable.

If a top 10 wasn’t enough, how about a top 25? Marcelo Fabri has written up a set of tips for increasing your app performance. Split into beginner, intermediate and advanced sections this is a solid set of recommendations if you are struggling with performance.

Jay Graves with an explanation of SSL pinning and then a guide to implementation. If you need to be sure that you are talking to the right server rather than a man in the middle before transferring data then you will want to take a look at this.

Core Graphics blending modes can be a little confusing if you are coming at them for the first time. If you are in this camp then Gordon Fontenot has an article taking you through the basics of blending drawing code with grayscale images to produce tinted images.

Design

After last week’s post on pixel perfection I was sent a link to this Pixel Perfect Precision Handbook. This iBook is an comprehensive guide to all things pixel perfect and is a really great resource if you are producing artwork for iOS apps. There is also an interesting discussion at the bottom of the post on their experience of using iBooks Author to build the book.

And finally...

A disk operating system for $13,000? Bargain.