Issue 93

10^th May 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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In the last few months, we have completely overhauled the Evernote SDK for iOS. We are committed to supporting the iOS community with platform tools that help build great apps. If you are building an app on the Evernote platform, make sure you submit to the Evernote Devcup and come to our upcoming meetups at WWDC & Evernote HQ.

News

Videos and slides from the recent LLVM conference in Paris. This is naturally all pretty low level stuff but I found a couple in here that were interesting to me. The session on clang-format for example, made my OCD go all tingly for a while. I would imagine there are a few preliminary Xcode vFuture (not so) secrets in here if you look carefully as well.

A new series of short (~5 minute) podcasts by Steve Scott on being an independent software developer, earning a living with your products rather than doing consulting and freelance work. I’ll admit that I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts as I only have a short commute and I find spoken word audio distracting when I am working so the short format of this really gets a big thumbs up from me.

Tools

This is cool. Visualise the view hierarchy of a running iOS app and monitor what NSNotifications are being posted at the same time. The visualisation of the view hierarchy shows you all views as a 3D model with each view being a “slice” extracted out. Even better, properties can be set on the view and the underlying layers with all changes being reflected right back into the running app.

Code

So you need a control to take input for a messaging/chat application. Easy right? Just use UITextField. What about expanding for multiple lines, or inserting an image from the camera, or showing a character count? I love it when people go to town with getting all of the little details right with a control and it looks like Philipe Fatio has done a great job here.

I’ve recently written a couple of command line utilities in Objective-C to help with some repetitive tasks and while I did look at using ddcli I ended up just hacking together some very primitive option support myself (which only works as the tools are used internally). This library by Chris Miller will not only parse out short and long form flags but also generate descriptions from the flags, looks like a great way to add proper option support if you are writing a command line tool.

I am a big fan of a well placed NSAssert but in case you aren’t you should read this article by Mike Ash which takes you on a thorough trip through the whys and hows of using assertions well.

Business and Marketing

My number one feature request for the App Store is to allow developers to upload a video which can be played back in the on-device App Store. Even though we can’t do that right now, we should still be producing videos to market our apps on the web. Sylvain Gauchet gives us the low down on how to do it right.

Josh Ledgard on discovering a new way to get some real life feedback from users during development. Obviously this wouldn’t work for all apps but if you are working on app which targets your average “person on the street” then this sounds like a fun way to get some feedback on your afternoon for a very reasonable amount of money.

And finally...

Oliver Cameron with an interesting rejection story. Hands up who tests their iPhone app with a Bluetooth keyboard connected?