Issue 94

17^th May 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

I mentioned last week that if you wanted some sneak peeks into what may be coming to Xcode/iOS/Mac OS it might be a good idea to keep an eye on open source projects such as LLVM and sure enough this week we get another glimpse at a possible future. This article from Nigel Brooke on the new Objective-C to JavaScript bridge that is being worked on in WebKit suggests that it might be one to watch for potentially being exposed publicly in a future version of iOS or Mac OS. Communication from a Web View back to Objective-C code using URLs has always felt like a bit of a hack to me so this would be a welcome addition to the toolkit.

Tools

I’ve linked to most of these tools separately over the last year but this week Mattt Thompson put together a new site for all his command line tools all in one place. Developer portal automation, creation and publishing of IPA builds, automated sending of push notifications, generation of pkpass PassBook files, validation of In-App Purchase receipts. A great collection of useful tools.

Code

Yes. A thousand times yes! I have been banging on about this subject for many years to anyone who will listen (usually people on our training courses so if you are in that lucky group of people then you can safely move on). Mattt Thompson proposes that Core Data isn’t the answer to everything and I couldn’t agree more. I am a big fan of a well placed plist for archiving small amounts of data when Core Data just feels like too much work and overhead.

Maarten Billemont with an interesting project which attempts to fix some of the issues with Core Data iCloud sync. I haven’t tried this myself so I can’t vouch for how successful it is but regardless, it’s great to see someone publishing code which attempts to help with this problem. I would probably still advise caution before jumping into Core Data + iCloud at the moment but if you are half way through an implementation of it you may find some help in here.

macOS Development

This will be an interesting one to watch unfold. Nick Arnott writes about a new piece of spyware recently discovered which is signed with a Developer ID. Doing a bit more research on this it seems like Apple have already revoked the Developer ID used to sign it but I am not sure if they have hit the kill switch to remove it from infected machines. Overall I think Gatekeeper has been a success, I fully expected that as a developer I would need to disable it and yet it has stayed enabled on all of my machines.

Design

I must admit I am guilty of just doing a 2x to 1x PNG conversion for our apps even though I knew it was not the highest quality option available. Meng To gives us a run down on custom designing 1x versions of assets to get that pixel perfect look for non-retina displays as well as on retina ones.

Disabled label, label, button, Button, BUTTON, and now you’ve gone too far…

Business and Marketing

Every time I see someone’s iPhone home screen and the badge on the App Store shows tens of apps awaiting updates I wish for a completely automated update mechanism for iOS. The good news in this article is that the stats for updates are actually pretty good with it stating that 90% of the upgrades for their app happened within ten days of release which isn’t bad at all. Don’t forget that when looking at your own numbers manu people will inevitably have uninstalled your app before it got updated so don’t try and map these numbers against initial sales as that will inevitably lead to disappointment.

Mike Lee on how he put together the press page for his most recent marketing push. It takes a lot of time and effort to put a page like this together (and don’t forget the time taken to write the reviewers guide, record, annotate and voice over the videos, and all of that other content) but having the key information available and well presented does pay dividends when it comes to getting potential reviewers look at your app.

And finally...

So if you could go ahead and do that, that’d be great.