Cocoanetics

I’m a Game Studio!

Jun 21, 2013

Until today I had only every tried my hands on a UIKit-based game, a clone of the Wheel of Fortune game show. Unfortunately Sony Entertainment asked Apple to ban this from the app store. So I had to take it offline.

Whenever an independent game developer had a success I would feel jealousy boil up in my stomach. If only I could also make games. But I was too busy mastering Objective-C and Apple’s frameworks (on iOS and Mac) to be able to devote time to learning Cocos2D.

This has entirely changed last week, when Apple announced the new Sprite Kit framework.

11 Comments

Radar: QLPreviewController Exception

Jun 20, 2013

According to the QLPreviewItem Protocol Reference for iOS:

“If the item is not available for preview, this property’s getter method should return nil. In this case, the Quick Look preview controller displays a ‘loading’ view.”

If you return nil for the previewItemURL as suggested the app is terminated with an exception.

This bug is filed as rdar://14216503 and on OpenRadar.

3 Comments

iOS 7 Icon Squircle

Jun 20, 2013

Apple is not only revamping the look of iOS 7 apps to be kind of flat, also most app icons will have to get a redesign.

Over the recent years we could see a trend that some app designers felt that they had to add a border to their icons to make them “pop more”. So they they enabled the “Icon already includes gloss effects” setting to avoid the application of the trademark shine and used a photoshop template for make the border fit.

We followed this trend with the icon design for our most recent app Urban Airship Commander which also has a chrome border. Because frankly, without this border, we feared that a phosphorous radar screen might look too boring…

62 Comments

And it is Flat After All!

Jun 11, 2013

On the first day of WWDC we finally got to see the result of Jony Ives’ plastic surgery on iOS 7. The new approach tries to build on familiar actions, but simplifying their visual representation. As is normally the case with such a broad redesign, it is polarizing.

Some individuals are already calling it a failure, while others feel that this again results in a leap ahead that reasserts Apple’s position as a leader.

10 Comments

Best Road Trip Ever

Jun 10, 2013

On the Sunday before WWDC 2013 was spent in good company, on a road trip to Cupertino. But before we took that, we got ourselves registered. Apple successfully pioneered a new system to streamline the registration process.

5 Comments

DIY Apple Pilgrimage Prep

Jun 07, 2013

This year’s Pilgrimage to the Apple Headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino is of the DIY variety. In past years Apple would have updated the Company Store website with information about extra opening times for WWDC tourists, but this year they didn’t.

Traditionally there were several busses organized by Scott Knaster. I don’t know if his reason for not doing it this year was lack of a WWDC ticket or lack of confirmed opening times. Either way his professionally organized tour did not come to pass this year.

5 Comments

DTRichTextEditor 1.5.1

Jun 06, 2013

This maintenance release for DTRichTextEditor fixes several crucial bugs. It is the last release before WWDC 2013.

3 Comments

DTCoreText 1.5.3

Jun 05, 2013

Last update before WWDC. This is a maintenance release fixing some pressing issues, some of which were causing crashing.

7 Comments

Apple-tab-span

Jun 05, 2013

An editor has to deal with the user hitting the tab key on an external keyboard and then be able to persist these tabs. Thus the question arose how I would best represent tab characters (\t) in HTML. At first I tried to encode them as 	 entities, but that is causing lots of trouble since on the parsing end it is difficult to know whether a tab came from this entity or if it came from the literal \t.

I could have done that with a very ugly hack of libxml2 (which powers my DTHTMLParser), but after having wasted half a day on this I relented. I previously reported my findings about Apple-converted-space which is the method NSHTMLWriter uses to preserve multiple spaces.

In this article I am documenting my findings related to how Apple conserves tabs for HTML output.

4 Comments

Reading Into The WWDC App

Jun 04, 2013

7 days (and change) before the WWDC 2013 Keynote presentation Apple released the official app to accompany the conference. Due to the (sudden, unexpected, surprising) sell-out of the conference Apple decided on several changes.

For starters the WWDC app allows all registered developers to log in and provides benefits even for developers who did not score a golden ticket. In previous years – if I remember correctly – the app would only let you see its contents if you had an activated WWDC to your name.

WWDC 2013 is even more highly anticipated than any previous Apple event due to the widespread notion that Apple is doomed if they don’t announce many big and impressive new things. For lack of anything better to pick apart, let’s do a bit of tea-leaf-reading on the WWDC 2013 app.

9 Comments

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