Developers received mail from app inviting them to join the waiting list for their new app analytics service. Such a service is long overdue and several businesses are based solely on there not having been any offering by Apple so far. That is about to change.
Introducing Core Image
I published a section from my book Barcodes with iOS on DZone. My book is not only about barcodes but also gives short introductions to a plethora of other frameworks which you might not normally come into contact with.
The Core Graphics framework is written in pure C, meaning that it’s impossible to use CGImage instances directly with UIKit. Apple created UIImage as an Objective-C wrapper class around CGImage to bridge the gap. We explore Core Image in this article.
My book currently available at a discount via the promo code mentioned on DZone.
Skipping Copy Phase Strip
If your app contains frameworks or extensions you are recently beginning to notice a new warning popping up when building for releases: “skipping copy phase strip, binary is code signed”. Here’s how to fix it.
Radar: UITextView Scroll Position Bug
Working on an issue that has been reported for Notepad Classic 2007 (currently free on App Store) I found that UITextView has problems keeping the scroll position when showing or hiding the keyboard.
This issue didn’t occur on iOS 7 and I wasted more than 5 hours trying to come up with a workaround. The problem is that showing and hiding the keyboard is causing superflous calls to layoutSubviews on the text view which causes it to change the contentSize and contentOffset. This gets further complicated by UITextView dynamically changing the contentSize as you scroll down through text that is longer than a few pages.
It is rare that I am so confounded by a bug, so I even opened a DTS call for it, hoping that there is a workaround for this problem.
Filed as rdar://20743459 and on Open Radar.
Radar: CLGeoCoder Bug
Fun fact! Sometimes Apple engineers confuse dupes of Radars with the original ones:
Engineering has determined that your bug report (20549548) is a duplicate of another issue (20553126) and will be closed.
And that even though my radar has the zip file with the sample app attached and the alleged original only a reference to my GitHub RadarSamples repo. Oh well… as long as Apple fixes the issue, I am happy to give the win to Peter Steinberger. Fatality!
But, I have one more bug report up my sleeve! A similar issue occurs server-side when using CLGeoCoder, so I filed this as rdar://20665320 and on OpenRadar.
Again, this bug report comes with a beautiful sample app. This is the first bug report sample app I made in Swift. Only took me 4 times as long than if I made it in Objective-C, but a developer’s gotta do what a developer’s gotta do. 🙂
Read more
Hey, I’m Famous!
A while ago I found myself mentioned on two sites as being popular. I wanted to document this for posterity.
Radar: NSDataDetector Bug
This has been bugging me for quite some time, since some of my address book contacts are affected. NSDataDetector does not properly handle addresses which have more than 2 numbers with one slash.
Previously, this issue was compounded by another issue in the geocoder which would take the apartment number (instead of the street number) for determining the geographic position. To workaround this I had to add another address to some of my contacts that didn’t have the apartment number. This seems to have been fixed in iOS 8.3, but NSDataDetector is still broken.
Filed as rdar://20549548 and on Open Radar. Read more
Make Money Socializing
Here’s a press release I’ve been working on. Awesome announcements from our startup ProductLayer!
Recommended Reading
My publisher asked me which websites typical iOS developers are going to. So I asked my Twitter followers and compiled the results into this list.
Implementing an In-App App Store
If you have an app like prod.ly, which shows a timeline of user’s messages you probably want interactive hyperlinks. In two previous posts I showed how I am customizing UILabel to customize hyperlinks drawing, as well as how to make them react to touches. For most links a UIWebView will do to show the content.
But not for content that people can purchase and/or download from iTunes or the Apple App Store. For this, there is SKStoreProductViewController. This post shows how to implement it.
