May 24, 2013

iOS Design Cheat Sheet V2 »

Devices resolutions, icon sizes and standard control dimensions (navbar, etc).

Well worth a bookmark.

May 23, 2013

Starters Guide to iOS Design »

Ben Taylor:

Instead of asking people what they want, show them what you’ve made and see how they react to it.

One of the many good design suggestions in this piece.

iOS Open Source: Photo Cropping Control

I bumped into PEPhotoCropEditor will browsing github late last night. Other than no comments in the code, the project is well written and intuitive to use.

PEPhotoCropEditor is an open source project created by Kishikawa Katsumi.

Steve Jobs Introduces The World To WiFi

The maestro of technology demonstrations introducing Mac Airport. Don’t miss the hola-hoop trick about 1:20 into the video.

May 22, 2013

Tutorial: Create Audio Jingle For Promoting Your App

Matt Long from Cocoa Is My Girlfriend walks through how to create what he fondly refers to as a “Happy Appy Song.”

Mike explains:

What is it, you ask. You’ve heard it. It’s a happy sounding fanciful tune that plays in the background as some narrator describes the wonders and benefits of an app

Unity Game Development Tools Now Free

The fee previously associated with publishing games created on Unity is now waived for those making less than $100,000 in the previous fiscal year.

Unity CEO David Helgason explains:

Today, we’re taking another step on this long road: as of right now, independent Unity developers will be able to deploy their games to Android and iOS platforms completely free of charge. Update Unity and you will find Android and iOS build options (previously basic add-ons) ready and waiting for you to use.

Official announcement from Unity

Prototype In Xcode Using Storyboard

Meng To, a self-taught UI/UX designer:

In this tutorial, I will focus on the Storyboard feature, a powerful tool in Xcode that allows you to build an App without a single line of code. You will be able to create a functional prototype in a matter of hours.

If you need a running start with Storyboard, I recommend you take a look.

iOS Crash Reporting: Part 2 of 2

Cesare Rocchi, from the Ray Wenderlich iOS Tutorial Team, continues with Part 2 in his series on working with crash reports.

In this post Cesare takes a close look at five crash reporting tools: Crashlytics, Crittercism, Bugsense, TestFlight and HockeyApp.

May 21, 2013

Miami Beach Develops First-Of-Its-Kind API

SD Times Newswire:

Miami Beach is the first destination in the country to invest at this level in an API to foster development of Miami Beach-based mobile apps and other future technologies. The API allows app developers to take advantage of, and mine, existing (and real-time) Miami Beach data to create applications that focus on shopping, dining, arts, entertainment, nightlife, sports, music, transportation and other areas.

The API platform will support third-party mobile application development for iOS (Apple), Android and Blackberry devices by allowing programmers access to data directly from Miami Beach.

Interesting idea.

iOS Open Source: Circular Menu For Content Sharing

Camden Fullmer:

CFShareCircle is a better way for app developers to let users share the content to many different services. It is a simple UIView that adds drag and share capabilities to a developers application.

CFShare as coded in the demo project:

You can download CFShare from github.

From C++ to Objective-C

A few years old, still a good read.

Pierre Chatelier on C++ to Objective-C:

At first, the Objective-C language seems to be an obstacle rather than a boost for Cocoa programming : it was so different that I couldn’t get into it. It took me some time to appreciate its challenges, and understand the many helpful concepts it supplies.

According to me, C# is, despite a bunch of advanced concepts, far less interesting than Objective-C, because it gives hard access to simple Objective-C features, and the Cocoa API quality is miles ahead of .NET. This personal opinion is not the subject of the present document.

Performance Of Concurrent Core Data Stacks

Florian Kugler provides a thorough analysis comparing the performance of three variations of Core Data Stack setups.

Xcoder Tool To Simplify Scripting & Automating iOS Builds

Written in ruby, Xcoder wraps the various build tools (Xcodebuild, keychain, etc) to automate the build process of iOS and Mac applications.

Cleaning Up Bad Code Via Dependency Graphs

Nicolas Seriot shares:

As developers, we all love clean code, but the fact is that most of the time we’re dealing with bad code. It may be recent or legacy code, written by ourselves or by other developers. We can recognize bad code because code smells. In other words, some heuristics raise questions about code quality. Among thoses we can name dead code…and tight coupling.

Nicolas goes on to explain how it is that one can achieve loose coupling, first by understanding the existing coupling, which is where his github project comes into play.

Here’s how it works:

I wrote objc_dep.py, a Python script which extracts imports from Objective-C source code. The output can then be displayed in GraphViz or OmniGraffle. You can then see an oriented graph of dependencies between classes.

And a finished graph:

May 20, 2013

Programming Magic With ReactiveCocoa

Ash Furrow on ReactiveCocoa:

When I was in university, every time I sat down to program I felt a rush of excitement and a sense of exploration. I would always learn something new, and things always felt new to me.

Somewhere along the way, programming lost its magic.

however…

…ReactiveCocoa feels like magic because it is magic: a collection of clever tricks on top of the Objective-C runtime that gives programmers the freedom to program declaratively.

Worth a look if you need a shot of adrenaline.