App.net reaches their funding goal, Apple releases Xcode 4.4 and almost kills armv6 support and a crowdsourced system estimates review times more accurately.
Podcast: Download (32.6MB)
Cubed CoreAnimation Conundrum
One of the big mysteries of CoreAnimations are 3D transforms. You might have seen them used in popular apps like Flipboard (page turn) but there are hardly any good tutorials in how they actually work. In fact, you find only one from 2008 what was written when OS X Leopard was still around.
I blame that there are several things that are counterintuitive about using 3D transforms and perspective with CoreAnimation why not more people play with it … and then write up what they learned in some useful guide.
Session 421 Core Animation Essentials from WWDC 2011 had an example of 6 squares that would animate into a three-dimensional box that the presenter could even rotate around. That inspired me to figure out how to do this as well, and with the help from several people on twitter I was successful.
Unit Tests Don’t Bite
You might have heard about the term “Test Driven Development”. The idea is – as I understand it – that for every problem you find in a component of your apps you create a Unit Test that fails. Then you fix the bug. The Test now passes. This can be carried further by writing your test cases even before you write any implementation code.
Especially when encapsulating your frequently-used code in static libraries or frameworks those unit tests can help save you a lot of grief. Imagine adding some nifty new feature to inadvertenly introducing a bug that would break some other existing functionality. If you run the unit tests they would show you immediately that your change broke something.
In this blog post I’m summarizing a couple of things to help you get your own unit tests started.
A Taller iPhone is a Giraffe
Blogger Mark Gurman from 9to5Mac caused quite a stir when he showed screen shots showing that Apple had secretly updated the iOS Simulator to be able to deal with the rumored higher resolution of the next iPhone. His hack involved some nasty code injection that had previously been used to demo iPad on Retina resolution long before the iOS Simulator supported that.
The point of his article was that the main visible difference between the 5.x and 6.0 springboards when having more screen space available. On iOS 5 you always get 4 evenly spaced rows of icons there while on iOS 6 you will get an extra row of icons with no increase in spacing.
Because Mark did not give detailed instructions as he achieved the result (to “protect his sources”) developers all around started to investigate and Cédric Luthi beat everybody to the punch, revealing a method that is so simple, even I was able to follow it.
Softly Killing iPhone 3G
The latest version that ever ran on the iPhone 3G was iOS 4.2.1, but even though iOS 4 brought multi-tasking to the platform the iPhone 3G never got that. The iPhone 3G had been introduced in June 2008 with 16 and 8 GB capacities. Of these the 16 GB was discontinued after 1 year while Apple kept the 8 GB model around as the cheaper iPhone. This was discontinued on June 4, 2010 when the iPhone 3GS took its place as the “cheap one” while the iPhone 4 became the “current model”.
Long story short: The iPhone 3G has been discontinued 2 years ago. But there is also a technical reason why 2012 will be the final nail in the coffin that buries the iPhone 3G: The deprecation of armv6.
GeoCorder 1.3.3
GeoCorder was having a problem that only became apparent if used over longer durations. Also it was quite elusive so we needed to open a technical support ticket with Apple to get help in finding it. And so we did, or more precisely: they found it and we fixed it.
Changes
- FIXED: Crash when recording for a long duration
- FIXED: Various stability improvements
Updates for both the free and the paid versions have been submitted to Apple.
Update August 15th: now available.
Out of Office
We’re offline for “maintenance” until August 2nd with no way to receive emails or respond to your requests and orders. We mention this so that you know why you won’t hear from us until then. We haven’t forgotten about you, we’ve just remembered about ourselves.
So please be patient while we’re recharging.
Multi-Context CoreData
When you start using CoreData for persisting your app data you start out with a single managed object context (MOC). This is how the templates in Xcode are set up if you put a checkmark next to “Use Core Data”.
Using CoreData in conjunction with NSFetchedResultsController greatly simplifies dealing with any sort of list of items which you would display in a table view.
There are two scenarios where you would want to branch out, that is, use multiple managed object contexts: 1) to simplify adding/editing new items and 2) to avoid blocking the UI. In this post I want to review the ways to set up your contexts to get you what you want.
Note: I am wrapping my head around this myself for the very first time. Please notify me via e-mail about errors that I might have made or where I am explaining something incorrectly.
Urban Airship Commander BETA
Imagine yourself implementing APN (Apple Push Notifications) using Urban Airship’s API and service. How do you go about testing the push functionality and possibly demonstrating it in front of your client?
The usual approach would be to peruse a web form on the Urban Airship site to send such notifications.
We felt a need to simplify the procedure and make it more fun for developers. So today we’re announcing UAC (Urban Airship Commander) which sets out to do exactly that.
Before Renewing Your Membership …
The month before your membership in the iOS Developer program expires Apple begins to gently remind you that renewal is coming up. If you don’t want to experience an “interruption in service” you better renew as soon as possible.
There are however a few gotchas that I’d like to point out to you … watch your provisioned devices as well as your DTS tickets!
