Issue 89

12^th April 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

This week is a bit of a special one for iOS Dev Weekly, on Monday this list tipped over 10,000 subscribers. I couldn’t have imagined it ever growing to these kind of numbers when I first started it so thank you all for staying subscribed, spreading the word and as always thanks to everyone in this community who produces such amazing content for me to link to every week. Here’s to the next 10,000.

Dave Verwer

Sponsored Link

Sensus is the world’s first app-enhancing, multisensor case for iPhone, developed by Minneapolis-based Canopy. The case expands the user interface from the front screen to the sides and entire back of the iPhone—scroll with your thumb, move your game controls to the back, add depth to your user experience.

News

The start of this week saw the launch of a significant refresh of the iOS provisioning portal with a few new features (deleting App IDs, yay) along with a consolidation of the Mac and iOS provisioning sections. There have been some teething troubles with it during the week (for example, not being able to add devices to profiles) but it looks like everything is working again now. Unfortunately the permalink for the announcement on the Apple site is broken so I have linked to the first tweet I noticed on Monday.

New site from Orta Therox and the CocoaPods team to provide a central repository of documentation for open source iOS libraries and controls. It automatically gathers AppleDoc documentation from every pod in the CocoaPods repository and hosts it for quick online access, what a great idea.

Tools

A comprehensive look at reading crash reports from Plausible Labs. Hopefully most people are familiar with reading the header and (hopefully symbolicated) stack trace sections but this article delves deeper into the depths of the “stuff below the stack trace” so this is definitely worth a read for when you come across that problem which is a little trickier to solve.

Smart idea from Craig Hockenberry, obvious when you see it but I had never thought of calling NSLog through a debugger command.

If you haven’t heard of Status Board this week then you must have been hiding under a rock. As soon as I saw it I thought it might be a nice place to have some visibility of the average App Store review times service that we run here so I added a couple of custom panels which you can add to your board showing the average review times and the 30 day trend graph.

Code

Krzysztof Zabłocki with a cute idea to use Interface Builder as a simple level editor when building an iOS game. This also serves as a reminder UIKit/Core Animation is a perfectly acceptable framework for writing simple 2D games. You may not get every ounce of performance like you would with Cocos2D or OpenGL directly but you won’t be as far off as you might imagine.

Business and Marketing

Hiring is without doubt the hardest part of running a software business (or in fact, any business) and technical interviews are difficult to get right. I really like this list of questions from Daniel Pasco, they are genuine questions which should be easy to answer for someone experienced with iOS development without falling into the trap of asking puzzle questions or questions which would be answered by the compiler.

Echoing last weeks sentiment by Jury, this article by Lex Friedman also argues that we should be raising our prices. I couldn’t agree more.

And finally...

… when to use a QR code.