iOhYes

• Facebook releases iOS Testing helper,  https://github.com/facebook/xctool
• Which mobile OS is generating more jobs, info graphic from Trovit.

Adam

• http://vim-adventures.com/,
• Alcatraz
  • KSImageNamed plugin
  • Lin plugin

John

• Appium, from SauceLabs, https://saucelabs.com/appium

Jason

• 1Password for iOS, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1password-password-manager/id568903335?mt=8

Matt

• Fish Shell, https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/

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The News

‘Google Now’ is available for iOS (more)

Facebook just acquired Parse (more)

The Discussion

For Xcode only, the ‘Alcatraz’ package manager (more)

• Available packages, https://github.com/mneorr/alcatraz-packages/blob/master/packages.json

1. Testing in iOS – Once again.

User Acceptance Testing

• Fragility vs. practicality
• UIKit Unit tests – need sim to run, various strategies to combat this.
• There are now 775,000 iOS apps available as of Jan 2013

iOS Picks

Adam Axe

• Alcatraz

Luther Baker

• MKStoreKit

John Sextro

• Careers page on StackOverflow.com

Eric Jones

• OpenGL ES Programming Guide for iOS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The News

Google forks WebKit (more)

Vine was recently the #1 app in the iTunes App Store (more)

AppGratis was just banned from the iTunes App Store (more)

The Discussion

Hybrid vs. Native App Dev

NSLocalizedString (more)

iOS Picks

Adam Axe

• Column Select in OS X – CMD + Option Drag with mouse

Luther Baker

• Mocks Aren’t Stubs, from Martin Fowler
• BlikiWiki app

John Sextro

• Titanium

Jason Kozemczak

• CKCalendar v1.0
  

Eric Jones

• Starting with OpenGL

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The News

TMobile iOS (more)

Pentagon allegedly ordering 650,000 iOS devices (more)

Let a broker sell you app (more)

Is iOS moving to a “flat” design and ditching skeuomorphism? (more)

The Discussion

Training Developers on iOS and Agile

NSLocalizedString (more)

The Challenges of Large iOS Development Teams

iOS Picks

Adam Axe

• WWDC Videos

Luther Baker

• Free, online, iOS6 book

Joe Hainline

• Feedly (iPad app and Chrome plugin) – import straight from Google Reader (RIP)
• LastPass Premium (password management, iPad app and Chrome plugin)

Eric Jones

• StackOverFlow (with a grain of salt)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The News

Crashlytics is now free (more)

New documentation generator for Clang (more)

Let a broker sell you app (more)

Microsoft Releases the Surface Pro (more)

Apple settles lawsuit over apps allegedly targeting kids for in app purchases (more)

The Discussion

Build Dependencies – Stop the insanity

• Adam’s blog post on the subject http://www.teamaxe.org/2013/03/dl-less.html  
• Cocoapods
• VendorKit
• Git submodule + XCode Workspaces
• iOS Universal Framework

Interface Builder/Storyboard/Core Data Issues

• Why is it changing my code?
• Seems broken.  Grrrr!  I can’t merge!

iOS Picks

Adam Axe

• [[UIWindow keyWindow] recursiveDescription]

John Sextro

• TEDx Talk:  You Should Learn to Program

Jason Kozemczak

• Trello for iPad

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Google Maps for iOS – 10 million downloads in 2 days! (more)

Instagram and Twitter do battle

• Instagram pulls photos from Twitter timeline (more)
• Instagram changes terms of service (more)
• Twitter releases photo filters (more)

Judge Koh Denies Apples Request to Permanently Ban Sale of Samsung Phones in US (more)

Sesame Street Releases Tablet Development Guidelines for Children’s Apps (more)

Key-Value Observer (more)

iPhone, iPod and iPad Universal App Strategies

• Single binary for all vs. different binaries for each device
• UX differences across platforms
• XIB vs View Classes
• View logic
  • Repeated idioms
  • Shotgun surgery
  • Divergent logic
  • completely separate View classes

iOS Picks

Adam Axe

• Sketchbook Pro

John Sextro

• Google Maps

Jason Kozemczak

• NUI by Tom Benner

Mike Schmidt

• NSHipster
• Mike Ash’s blog

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iOS Piracy – Can we prevent it? (more)

Apple fires manager of the Maps team. (more)

Gmail 2.0 for iOS released

• It’s still HTML
• Google bought Sparrow but hasn’t seemed to do much with it.

Race to the Bottom Pricing

• Is everything going to be $.99 soon?

The iPad Mini

• Hit target problems
• Adherance to the Human Interface Guideline
• Why can’t I touch some targets?
• (more)

Core Animation

• Pros
  • Easy to do simple animation properties (alpha, position) with good options (reversing, repeating, delaying)
  • Great performance
• Cons
  • Need to know C API to do more powerful things
  • C API isn’t ARC – need to understand memory management
• Performance Considerations
  • Layer creation – CALayer is expensive to new up.
  • UIBezierPath for shadowpaths – compositing alpha channel for shadow generation is expensive, can you create your own shadowPath
  • UIView block-based animation – Setting things in completion block rather than signing up for delegation.

iOS Picks

Adam Axe

• Window Tidy for OS X

John Sextro

• Square and the Register App

Jason Kozemczak

• Clutch.IO open sourced (https://github.com/clutchio/clutchios) AB testing for iOS.

James Rantanen

• Fantastical – Calendar app for iOS

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Exec releases new iOS app

• Basically all custom controls (no UIKit).
• Good or bad?
• Is this devs not pushing back on designers not using standard UI/UX?
• (more)

Oprah promotes Surface via iPad (more)

Apple Stock price slides 20%

• Profit taking?
• Beginning of the End?
• (more)

UIAutomation

• mechanic.js
  • Why it exists – UIAutomation is powerful, but it’s API leads to verbose and brittle code.
  • Helps you get the elements you care about and interact with them in a terse and readable way
  • jQuery for UIAutomation – helps you “find” the elements you want in very little code
    • mechanic performance
      • generally does a tree traversal starting at the selector’s context (defaults to the frontMostApp()) – however, the performance gains are at the scale of user interactions like taps and scrolls, so the performance hit is inconsequential.
      • a “non issue”

      gotchas – as your App’s “DOM” changes, the selectors need to be “re-ran”

    • UIAutomation equality is broken, which makes more obscure parts of mechanic simply not work
      • Iterating a UIAElement’s children and comparing a child to itself via indexor comes back as not equal.
      • Combined with Jasmine UIAutomation shim makes for very readable, maintanable UI tests/specs

• Jasmine UIAutomation shim –  git://github.com/mczenko/UIAutomation-jasmine-iphone.git
  • Allows tests to be more BDD-focused. Elements some of the verbosity of UIAutomation tests – better separation. Great for fans of RSpec and Jasmine
• UIAutomation CI integration
  • Not the easiest, due to simulator state
  • There are workarounds
  • Bwoken is a ruby gem that can make your life easier for running your UIA tests in CI
  • Adam has a very rudimentary XSLT to convert OCUnit output to JUnit XML output for Jenkins test reporting.

iOS Picks

Adam Axe

• CS193P – New iBooks Author based text book for free

John Sextro

• uNu Power DX External Protective Battery Case
• Updates from Amazon/Kindle - iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Third Edition (3rd Edition) by Aaron Hillegass

Jason Kozemczak

• Foundation/UIKit header files (lots of insight into how the classes architected; good place to learn about API design)
• CKCalendar gets new features: (height change delegate method, fixed height setting, “fill calendar” option, improved performance, etc.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download