Issue 96

31^st May 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

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News

Reassuringly sensible predictions from Jim Dalrymple for WWDC. Off the top of my head, I’m hoping we get to see some iCloud fixes of course but I am also hoping for Scene Kit ported to iOS, better support for inter app communication (maybe including Remote View Controllers?), Automatic updating of apps (with opt-out rather than opt-in) and my stretch goal… Please can we have an Apple TV App Store and SDK. We promise to do cool things with it.

Tools

New iOS app from Adobe for creating colour palettes. I really love the headline feature of this app which is to automatically choose a colour palette directly from the viewfinder as you pan around your environment with the camera. Super useful if your office is on top of a majestic mountain or in a room filled with brightly coloured flowers (seriously though, I do really like this feature).

Pete Steinberger with a very handy snippet of code for helping to track down UIKit access on a background thread. This is such a common problem in apps that I really wish there was something built in to warn people about this. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t ship apps with this enabled, just for debugging.

Code

Milen Dzhumerov with an extremely detailed and well written post on how the sync works in the todo list app, Clear. They use iCloud file storage rather than Core Data sync to sync a series of transactions for the app state rather than the end result data itself. It’s also a great write up of exactly why this is a hard problem.

In response to Florian Kugler’s article that I linked to in Issue 90, Martin Pilkington has also taken a look at AutoLayout performance and has put together some tips on how to keep your performance up when throwing hundreds of views and constraints around.

Speaking of Florian Kugler and performance, his latest article on was published this week and this time it tackles rendering performance. He builds the same table cell three times using views, layers and finally rendering directly in drawRect:. The results might be surprising if you are still going the route of drawRect: for performance.

Design

The 53/Paper team write about tackling the problem of keeping context while zoomed into an image. I really love the “lens” implementation of zoom that they settled on and as with everything else about their app, they are really sweating the details on this.

Neven Mrgan again this week taking a closer look on the wording used on a common feature of apps, how to ask users to take a photo or choose one from their photo library. The array of inconsistency is not particularly surprising but it is a little disappointing. However there is some great advice in here on choosing wording in your apps, especially the tip recommending not to repeat key words in every menu option.

Business and Marketing

Interesting perspective from Marcus Zarra on what a client should be looking for in an iOS developer. I have long thought that everyone would be more successful if the people looking to get apps made asked better questions of their developers before signing on the dotted line (which assumes a contract is being drawn up which is still something a shocking number of people don’t do). Good set of questions here.

And finally...

Was I really so naive to think that ARC would be the end of people trying to use retainCount?