Issue 91

26^th April 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So WWDC tickets arrived, stuck around for a few seconds and then departed in 5,000 lucky people’s (virtual) pockets. If you were trying to grab one then I hope you were lucky like I was but if not then the good news is that the video content looks like it will be available even during the conference this year so that’s some kind of consolation. I will be organising a small meet-up event for iOS Dev Weekly this year but I haven’t got anything more than that to announce yet, details will of course be posted here when the time comes though. Hope to see some of you there.

Dave Verwer

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News

If you didn’t manage to get a WWDC ticket, it doesn’t mean you can’t come to San Francisco and join in the unofficial events for the week. Like last year, AltWWDC is running a week long alternative to WWDC with a place to work from and great lunchtime sessions with some excellent speakers. Even better, this year the venue is only one block from Moscone so even if you do have an official ticket you might want to drop in and join in with some of the fun.

In what might be the conclusion to the App Store pricing discussion that we have seen over the last few weeks Marco Arment says what I was trying hint at in my comments last week in a much more eloquent way. His last sentence sums it all up for me, “The bar is higher, but the market is fine.”

Tools

Alcatraz is an open source plugin, theme and template manager for Xcode. I have linked to a good number of Xcode plugins here in the past but I would imagine many people didn’t install them thinking they would be a pain to install/manage, Alcatraz makes it a single click to install (or uninstall). Just be cautious how many of the plugins you install unless you want to go back to Xcode crashing like it it’s v4.0 again.

Ole Begemann with everything you ever wanted to know about compiler warnings but were afraid to ask. Switching on all, extra and everything warnings is too much but with a bit of tweaking (removing unused method parameters, auto-synthesis warnings, etc…) but you can get it down to a manageable set fairly quickly that will help you zero in on potentially dangerous code in your apps.

When I first started reading this article by Mark Dalrymple I thought it was going to be about writing a gesture recogniser test harness, turns out it’s about hijacking debug log output instead. Interesting article nonetheless though.

Code

This two part article by Matthijs Hollemans is a great brush up on your trigonometry. This kind of stuff is almost essential if you are writing games but I have had to dust off my old trigonometry text books a couple of times over the years for UIKit stuff as well. Worth a read if this was a skill that had fallen by the wayside (like it had for me).

Florian Kugler with an interesting article on Auto Layout. I hadn’t really considered that there would be a performance penalty to using Auto Layout but it makes perfect sense as the possibilities are much more flexible than with manual layout and that must come at a price. Florian takes a look at just how much that flexibility costs.

Open source, well documented, block based disk and memory cache library from Justin Ouellette of Tumblr, looks pretty good to me.

Design

Steven Hoober with a fascinating and well researched article on designing for touch screens, specifically designing tap targets to be big enough (but not too big) and being free of interference with other targets.

Business and Marketing

I had no idea that the journey to the release of Ridiculous Fishing was such a bumpy one. Russ Pitts has written up this fascinating story, this one is definitely worth your time.

And finally...

I’ve had a couple of custom printed iPhone/iPad sketchbooks over the last few years but I like this as a cute way to turn any piece of paper into an iPhone sketch.