Articles

I think that the rapid uptake of new versions of iOS, coupled with the relatively homogenous nature of the device ecosystem is one of the most underappreciated advantages iOS has over Android, at least for developers. Even so, supporting iOS 6 and 7 across iPhone and iPad can be a serious undertaking. I can't imagine trying to support a popular app on Android, where you have to deal not just with a wide range of operating system versions, but also a staggeringly large number of devices, many o...

Control of the Week: Canvas

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App of the Week

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Happy (belated) Thanksgiving to all of you in the United States! It was a slow news week, for the most part, as the United States was on holiday for half the week. But, nevertheless, there were some interesting developments here and there that will be of interest to iOS and OS X developers. Perhaps most interesting was the confirmation that Apple acquired the Israeli startup PrimeSense, perhaps best known for creating the technology behind Microsoft's Kinect. The article (linked to below) not ...

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A couple summers ago, I wrote a blog post detailing some of the pluses and minuses of hybrid apps on iOS. The conclusion I came to at the time was that, for the most part, they simply weren't worth it. Facebook agreed and released an incredibly well-done, well-reviewed native rewrite of their app. But, inevitably, things change, and I wonder if it's worth taking another look at hybrid native apps. But, perhaps wi...

CLImageEditor

You might not know this about me, but when I'm not slinging Ruby or Objective-C code, I'm almost certain to have a camera in my hands. I try not to obsess about photography gear too much because a) what's behind the viewfinder is more important than what's immediately in front of it, and b) it can get very expensive very quickly. But, I'm certainly not immune to the allure of new stuff. Lately, my obsessions have been proceeding in two rather divergent directions:

JFOpenWeatherMapManager

In case you missed it, news came out last week that Apple is spending over half a billion dollars on sapphire glass, the same kind that's used to cover the 5s' Touch ID sensor. You might remember a few years back that Apple was looking into using a metal alloy called Liquidmetal, and did a sort of 'test deploy' with the SIM card ejection tool included with iPhones. Nothing more ever emerged, but Apple also never spent $578 million on Liquidmetal either. Does Apple really expect to spend that m...

Welcome to our weekly roundup! With Apple's last batch of product announcements for the year behind us, it seems clear now that we'll have to wait until 2014 to see a new Apple TV, an iWatch, or an actual Apple television. But that's alright, because we have a ton of cool, new toys to play with until then. The iPad Air is ridiculously light, and, after having played with one yesterday, it was actually a bit tough for me to say definitively that I'd rather go for a retina iPad mini, but I do lo...

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We're delighted to have Helpshift back as our sponsor this week. Check out their new CocoaPod for even faster integration into your iOS apps:

pod 'Helpshift', '~> 3.2.0'

This week's Weekly Roundup is brought to you by Helpshift, the customer engagement platform for iOS apps. I've tried out Helpshift and I must say I couldn't be happier. It is, by far, the best support system I've used for my apps, and the easiest to integrate.

Every customer conve...

Apple's big fall product announcements happened last week. Plus, iOS 7 app updates continue to trickle in. This past week finally saw Tweetbot 3's release. Not surprisingly, but perhaps somewhat irritatingly, a large number of reviews for the app are one star on the basis that it's a paid upgrade. I'm continually astounded by the sense of entitlement that some users have, especially on a product that they will likely use every day (or in my case several times a day). But, that is the nature of...

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Welcome to our weekly roundup! This coming week, we'll see Apple's final round of product announcements for calendar year 2013. And, as always, the event promises to not disappoint. Whether you're looking for new Mac Pros, the release of Mavericks, MacBook Pros, iPads mini and otherwise, you're undoubtedly in for a treat! It's even possible, depending on how reliable you consider MG Siegler's sources to be, that we'll see a n...

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Hello, and welcome to our weekly roundup! This week, Brent Simmons continued his fantastic series of articles over on his blog about building Vesper, the note-taking application created by him, Dave Wiskus, and John Gruber. He offers up a lot of great insight into making a decision on SQLite3 vs Core Data. Speaking for myself, I actually spent a good deal of time this past week getting a handle on Marco Arment's SQLite ORM library, FCModel. ...

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