Issue 98

14^th June 2013

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

What a week… WWDC has been amazing so far (still one more day to go) and I think the changes to iOS 7 are the most exciting thing to happen to iOS since the introduction of the first iPhone. Mavericks is also a really solid update to Mac OS and I can’t wait to see what people do with both of them. If you came up and said Hi during WWDC then thank you as well, it’s been great to meet so many of you! Dave

Dave Verwer

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News

One of the most significant announcements this week was the new ability in iTunes Connect to transfer apps between accounts. This has been a long standing problem with the App Store and it’s great to see it resolved. There are some other significant changes to iTunes Connect which were announced this week so you should be watching “What’s New in iTunes Connect” from the 2013 videos for more information on that.

Chris Eidhof, Daniel Eggert and Florian Kugler have started a new regular email for Objective-C developers. It seems like they are going to cover broad areas of iOS development with several issues on each topic and they are starting off by digging into view controllers. From what is there so far this looks like it is going to be really good and I know you all like receiving regular iOS focused email so you will probably want to subscribe to this.

Tools

I am sure we have all seen the option to play a sound and continute on a breakpoint in Xcode before but I don’t really know anyone who was using it seriously. Markos Charatzas has a fun way to use the feature to look for patterns of behaviour in your code by triggering sounds with significant events in your code and then listening for out of the ordinary sequences of noises. Fun.

Subliminal is a new integration test framework which gives an Objective-C front end to the Apple UIAutomation testing framework, open sourced by Inkling this week. I never got on with the Javascript syntax of UIAutomation so having an Objective-C interface to it will suit me well and I am definitely going to be checking this out.

Code

One of the biggest surprises for me this week was the announcement of Sprite Kit, when it was first mentioned I figured it would be an easier way to do simple sprite based views but it is so much more than that. Steffen Itterheim digs into what this means for Cocos 2D in a detailed post without bending the NDA too much. My feeling is that Sprite Kit could actually be one of the biggest blows against other mobile platforms that iOS has dealt for a while.

My assembly knowledge is significantly out of date now (the first assembly I wrote was 6502 which probably dates me a little) so this was a very enjoyable read from Matt Galloway. Reading and understanding ARM assembly isn’t something you will need every day but it’s always good to be more informed about what’s going on under the hood of iOS.

macOS Development

With all of the iOS 7 talk, it’s easy to forget that we also had an announcement of a major new version of Mac OS this week as well.

Design

Matt Gemmell takes a good look at the design changes in iOS 7 and compares them to iOS 6. Overall I am very pleased with the changes that have been made. Sure, they will take some adjustment and I don’t think they are perfect at the moment by any means but like Matt, I really like the direction they are taking with it.

I wondered whether the new icon grid template that has been talked about during WWDC this week would be put out there officially by Apple but it turns out that we don’t need to wait to see if it is as John Marstall has already done a great job recreating it. If you are designing icons for iOS 7 then you need to get familiar with this.

Business and Marketing

Stuart Hall noticed that as with every year at this point many apps are having their ratings harmed by idiots who expect apps to work on day one of a major beta operating system release. I am pretty sure that if all 11,000 of us reading this filed a radar asking for reviews to be blocked from beta operating systems today it would be pretty certain to be implemented for the iOS 8 beta, let’s make it happen.

One disappointment with iOS 7 (so far, it could change of course) was that the App Store is largely untouched from iOS 6. These posts by John August and Nick Dalton have some interesting suggestions, I especially like Nick’s idea to base a chart on long term use. I really don’t think there is anything which is a better indicator of an app’s quality and usefulness than how long it stays on my phone while still being launched regularly.

And finally...

What a lovely touch on the new notification sheet in iOS 7.