Microsoft and Xamarin Expand Global Partnership
You might ask what this article is doing in iOS Dev Weekly but I think this is big news. There are an enormous amount of .NET developers out there and the next version of Visual Studio will have built in support for downloading Xamarin to enable "native" iOS development out of the box. Also, as part of the same announcement it was interesting to see Microsoft open source the .NET framework, including taking contributions. Truly, times have changed.
Michael Lopp on the mindset and skills needed for working in QA. Dedicated QA teams may be less common these days, but it's more important than ever as bugs are much more likely to have serious consequences. Often our data is only a WHERE clause away from the next customer's instead of locked up securely in our disconnected Windows 95 PC. Such a great post, you really shouldn't skip this one.
So with WWDC rapidly approaching (I am currently at 35,000ft mid-way across the Atlantic as this is going out) I have included a few WWDC related links below in addition to the regular sections this week. Please do come and say hello if you are going to be at Moscone next week (best way to contact me is on Twitter, @daveverwer), hope to see some of you there... Dave.
I got all excited for the October 16th event yesterday with the talk about Apple TV partnerships. Turns out the partnership only extended as far as bundling an Apple TV alongside a Phillips TV 😆. It's still possible that we'll see Apple's hobby project come up on stage next week alongside the new iPad and Mac models but I don't expect to see any actual TV hardware if it does, just the little black box.
Is everyone ready to submit their Watch apps? I'd expect to be able to put them in for review early next week after the event on Monday. Good luck if you're aiming for day one!
Talking of Apple events, if you're planning to be in San Francisco (ticket or no ticket!) during WWDC week and you would like to give a talk at AltConf this year, they have a call for speakers open now.
Sliding clocks around the screen a la Path
More path UI deconstruction from Tim Duckett, this time is the turn of the floating date hint. There is another interesting article by Florian Mielke linked from the end Tim's post which is also worth reading. Let's all try and remember that what worked in the Path UI may or may not work in your app though and try to stop this and the radial menu becoming the next pull to refresh.
Facebook iOS SDK - OverTheAir2012 REMIX
Chris Ross, Kieran Gutteridge and a few others started this tweaking of the iOS SDK for Facebook at a hack day last weekend with the admirable goal of making a more usable SDK to work with Facebook on the iOS platform. It is possible that this could be Sherlocked next week but even if it is it will still be useful for iOS4/5 compatible apps. Great work.
Coverflow with UICollectionView
Ole Begemann mentioned last week on Twitter that GitHub would soon be full of UICollectionViewLayout subclasses and Jonathan Wight took the baton this week and published an implementation of Coverflow as a UICollectionViewLayout subclass. Being able to craft these subclasses with ease is going to become a core iOS development skill over the next year so dig into the code and take a look at a real world example.
Ironically I just happened to be in Montreal on vacation while Çingleton was happening last year but I didn't have a ticket so while I managed to join in on some chatter in the hotel bar I missed the content of the conference. Luckily along with the announcement of the dates for next year's conference the organisers have released 5 session videos from last year.
Craig Hockenberry recently put out a quick survey for iOS developers to see who was planning to update their apps for iOS 7. The results were predictably high at 95% for that first question but the second question asked who was planning to go iOS 7 only for their next update and those figures might surprise you. That said, it's exactly what I am doing with one of our app updates that is currently in progress so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised.