A brief update for all of you on a few topics of note over the past weeks: App Store revenue, iPhone 6 rumors, iOS testing, and Swift.
First, Allen Ding, the creator of Kiwi, a BDD framework for Cocoa, writes about his experiences with making money in the App Store. In his first attempt to make money on his app, Saved, he used a freemium model, saw the app downloaded 107,000 times after spending about $1,500 on Facebook ads and iAds, and made...$527. Ouch. He then moved to a paid model, and saw his downloads decline by two orders of magnitude, while revenue quadrupled. It's worth your time to read the whole thing. (Also, Allen, if you happen to read this, I wish you'd put a link to your app in your blog post. I couldn't find a link to download it anywhere.)
Second, iPhone 6 rumors and conjecture continue apace in the buildup to the September 9 media event where it's expected that the new phone(s) will be launched. John Gruber wrote a very thorough examination of expected screen resolutions and DPIs for a 4.7" and 5.5" iPhone 6. Meanwhile, Macrumors published what appear to be photos of either the iPhone 6 or a current-gen iPod touch. Either way, shiny, shiny photos for your enjoyment.
Third, a reader, Ben, followed up on last week's post on testing strategies with a link to a very interesting-looking testing framework called Subliminal, which offers a UI Automation-like integration testing experience in Objective-C. I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet, but it could be incredibly useful if it can remove some of the sharp edges around using UI Automation.
Finally, Melvin Rivera passed along a link to a handy website called That Thing in Swift, which offers its readers idiomatic Swift versions of common iOS development tasks. I hope it gets filled in with more examples.
Best,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- New iPhone 6 Images Depict Rear Shell and Front Panel Together for the First Time
- Conjecture Regarding Larger iPhone Displays
- That Thing in Swift
- Believing in the App Store
- Subliminal - An understated approach to iOS integration testing.
Control of the Week
Weekly Roundup
VBFJellyView
VBFJellyView is a custom view made out using UIKit Dynamics and with a very funny effect when adding behaviours to it. MIT licensed. |
FlatButton
Create Bootstrap 3.0-like buttons. License unspecified. |
LBHamburgerButton
UzysAssetsPickerController
Alternative UIImagePickerController , You can take a picture with camera and pick multiple photos and videos MIT licensed. |
THNotesTextView
UITextView with the look of a Notebook MIT licensed. |
VBPieChart
Pie Chart iOS control with different animations to present. MIT licensed. |
Extractor Localizable Strings
TextFieldValidator
This control will help you to manage all kinds of validation effectively. For this you just need to provide regex string and other things will be handled by control itself. Check out my blog for more reference: http://dhawaldawar.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/uitextfield-validation-ios/ MIT licensed. |
SHFlatButton
A UIButton subclass to for Flat Buttons to create 3d styled Flat Buttons with shadows MIT licensed. |
ENTabBarView
A clean & simple TabBar View for OS X in Objective-C MIT licensed. |
DrawCircleFrame
Small framework which animates a line drawn around your custom text. My intention was to focus user attention on a button. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
JCDialPad
Chameleon
CDRTranslucentSideBar
Translucent Side Bar for iOS7 CocoaPods pod 'CDRTranslucentSideBar' Apache 2.0 licensed. |
THCalendarDatePicker
A DatePicker based on a custom calendar view. MIT licensed. |
ObjectivePGP - OpenPGP implementation
ObjectivePGP is an OpenPGP implementation for iOS and OSX. zlib licensed. |
CHCircleGaugeView
A configurable chart that depicts the value of a measurement using a subtle animation. MIT licensed. |
BFPaperTabBar
iOS UITabBar inspired by Google's Paper Material Design. MIT licensed. |
THSegmentedPager
Simple plugin-sample using the HMSegmentedControl and a UIPageViewController to show Tabs MIT licensed. |