This maintenance release addresses a few minor build issues with the new Xcode 5.1.
Printing to Thermo-Labels
A few days ago I largely finished chapter 5 of my book where I explain how to print a sheet of QR stickers as well as individual serial number barcodes to roll-feed printers. The latter is a new capability of iOS 7 and extremely useful if all you want to print is a single label. This is why I picked the use case of a serial number barcode for my book. The assumption for the sample app is that you want to print a single serial number as Code 93 which you would stick to the back of some corporate IT hardware item.
Read my Book!
For the past four months I have been working almost exclusively on my Book Barcodes and iOS 7, which is why there have been only very few tutorial blog posts on Cocoanetics.com. Now the first fruits of my labor of love are yours for the picking.
My publisher Manning has started the MEAP pre-order program for the book. This MEAP program gives you – of course – the final book when it is finished, but you can also read the chapters in their raw unedited state as I finish them.
Even better, you can read the first chapter for FREE, no purchase necessary. This chapter gives you a solid overview over the barcode types that iOS 7 can scan, explains their differences and shows where they are used.
ABC Testing Banners
Recently we announced that we are starting pre-registrations for developer accounts for our Product Layer project. We bought a few thousand impressions on Ray Wenderlich’s well-known tutorial website. Different banner slogans produced different conversion results.
Google Analytics Alternatives
We use Google Analytics in some of our apps, but lately some people have grown dissatisfied with it. In particular non-technical people find it confusing how data is being presented. We iOS engineers had to wait for a long time for Google to finally add arm64 support.
So I asked on Twitter for recommendations.
Urban Airship Commander 1.2.0
After a very long time we are able to release an updated version of Urban Airship Commander (with iOS7 support), our app for easily sending push notifications via Urban Airship. So people and developers out there: Please buy Urban Airship Commander so we can add a lot new features to the app or even create an iPad version!!
From Barcodes to ProductLayer
One fine day, late summer 2013, I noticed that Apple had added a ton of new functionality to iOS, in particular related to barcodes. This set a train of thought in motion, the fruits of which are just now beginning to show.
Radar: Aztec and PDF417 Core Image Generators documentation missing
While researching for my book “Barcodes and iOS” I was looking at the CoreImage generators for barcodes. iOS 7 supports generating QR, Aztec and PDF417 barcodes via CoreImage generators.
But for the latter two the documentation appears to be missing, making those – technically – private APIs. I believe this to be something that was simply overlooked, since those generators seem to work just fine.
Filed as rdar://15989297 and on Open Radar.
Update: An Apple evangelist responded to my inquiry and confirmed that those CI generators are indeed private API and should not be used.
Mysterious Sudden Twitter Fame
Monday afternoon, in the Cocoanetics offices. Colleague René is discussing with us an approach how to centralize some code without inheritance and is drawing on the whiteboard. Suddenly my iPhone begins to vibrate.
My first thought was that this must be the silent ringing when there is an incoming voice call. It didn’t stop even though we tried to ignore it for a few seconds. Then I glanced at the phone and noticed that I was getting a flash flood of push notifications from Tweetbot.
Update: JustUnfollow posted an interview with me.
