Cocoanetics

Oliver Drobnik talks about selling Linguan and why. Then why barcode scanning in iOS 7 is enough of a game changer to warrant writing a book and creating a web-based service. Ad Show Notes Latest status of looking for a buyer to acquire Linguan. Barcodes in iOS 7 are the inspiration for a book and a service. The book will be using barcodes as a thread that runs through it, but cover a variety of iOS 7 techniques: barcode scanning, generation and printing, user location context, networking, background fetching and PassKit. The service is named Product Layer. It will provide an API for developers to get basic product information to enable a new kind of interesting app scenarios which have not been possible before. Follow us @cocoanetics or mail us to give feedback.

Toni Kaufmann and Oliver Drobnik chat about recent events, Toni shares some stories about where Microsoft has a leg up on Apple, and the history and future of WWDC. Ad Show Notes Toni Kaufmann Company: http://www.n3xd.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/tonik173 Facebook (German): http://www.facebook.com/n3xd.de Facebook (English): http://www.facebook.com/n3xd.en YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/n3xdsoftwarestudios His Apps List of public apps from n3xd:  http://www.makingapps.de/who-is-who/programmieren/n3xd-software-studios-ag?filter=app Passwort: https://itunes.apple.com/ch/app/passwort-unique-passwords/id474416620 Passwort Algorithm: https://github.com/tonik173/Passwort-Encoder Alpineflower Finder: https://itunes.apple.com/ch/app/alpineflower-finder-discover/id576307211 Zoo Zürich: https://itunes.apple.com/ch/app/zoo-zurich/id527856894?l=en&mt=8 Working on next big release 1.5 for DTRichTextEditor and DTCoreText. AutoIngest for Mac now with Sparkle. Refer to my WWDC ticketing flow chart to see the plethora of problems people had. Some statistics and musings on Women and WWDC. A new blog for Women and Tech. On the specifics of working with multiple people on Open Source projects. Using Kaleidoscope and SourceTree to diff and merge source code visually.

David Mendels and Oliver Drobnik follow up on previous weeks topic “Women in Tech” and then discuss great new tools for developers. Ad Show Notes Tools mentioned: Crashlytics Deploymate, dupe my Radar Apple Configurator Buildozer Linguan Slender for Mac Self-hostable SCM systems mentioned: GitHub Enterprise Gitorious GitLab Stash is BitBucket’s self-hosting solution CI System: Jenkins David Mendels: app.net and Twitter: @davmendels Personal Blog “Attila” Oliver Drobnik: app.net and Twitter: @cocoanetics Cocoanetics Blog

Trying out a new format, a friendly chat with David Mendels a real professor and iOS developer. We’re talking from many topics from nano technology to how to get more girls into science and tech. Ad Show Notes Other Podcasts mentioned: Mac OS Ken Debug NSBrief MacBreak Weekly Apple’s iBooks Author How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by 500% in One Year (Video) David Mendels: app.net and Twitter: @davmendels Personal Blog “Attila” Oliver Drobnik: app.net and Twitter: @cocoanetics Cocoanetics Blog

Apple updates Xcode 4.4, seeds the first point release for Mountain Lion, and somehow manual symbolicating of crash reports has become broken. Ad Show Notes On August 7th Apple released version 4.4.1 of Xcode. Besides the already known 4.4 news the release notes are simply “This update runs on both OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion.”. There was an article by Apple Insider that claimed that 4.4.1 was the first release of Xcode as a standalone app, but apparently they deleted the article after realizing that this was BS. Though you still can find all the other blogs which simply copied some contents of the original content. I think I remember that Xcode 4.3 was the first version which replaced the installer app with an Xcode.app and moved some of the developer tools inside the app bundle. Version 10.8.1 of Mountain Lion is not out to the public yet, but if you’re registered for the Mac developer program you have received an invite to the seed download invitation. There were rumors that this supposedly tweaks something about the graphics card to use less battery because people were claiming reduced battery endurance with 10.8. Though the seed notes do not mention this. A user opened the distribution files in a tool called “Pacifist” and reports this: Things of Note: Mail, QuickTime Player, kernel, AppleSmartBatteryManager (AHA!), 802.11, AHCI, and USB kexts, updates to system Mail components, Messages components, Bonjour. Zimbra + Mountain Lion not being able to add calendar entries over CalDAV = Bug in Zimbra, Workaround is to set the default alert times. The problem occurs if the Calendar app tries to add an appointment with no alert set. Weird that this never occured before. In fact this was always working perfectly on my iOS devices. But ok, I set the default alerts and now the problem no longer occurs. Several developers reported that they are no longer able to manually symbolicate crash reports with the Xcode 4.4 tools. We found this problem ourselves as well trying to symbolicate a crash report with a dSYM and app binary which had before generated on our Jenkins build server. There are two apparent workarounds, though I don’t understand how those are interrelated: Getting the atos start address, or hacking the symbolicate script. As I understand it then you can just look at the latter because the atos one only works if you have the debug symbols not stripped from the binary. The script fix is about helping mdfind which is used by the script to find the binary inside the .app bundle to actually find it. It might have to do with some people renaming the app bundle and dSYM after building to for example include the build number. Smart App Banners Using a Software Update Server

App.net reaches their funding goal, Apple releases Xcode 4.4 and almost kills armv6 support and a crowdsourced system estimates review times more accurately. Ad Show Notes Since July 10 when Apple has released the Xcode 4.4. GM they started to accept submissions made with 4.4. They specifically encourage developers to use the new Mountain Lion features in their submitted apps, specifically highlighting the “new cross-platform Game Center Groups, so they’ll be available when OS X Mountain Lion ships”. Having a shiny new version of Xcode also raised the question whether we could also submit iOS apps with that. Some very early adopters reported being rejected for Xcode 4.4. being not yet accepted. But soon thereafter other developers reported successful submissions. So at present we believe that Xcode 4.4. can be used for building app store legal iOS apps. According to Apple the only difference between Xcode 4.4 and Xcode 4.5 is that the latter includes the iOS 6 BETA SDK. Though there are also some important differences that I was able to see. There is no iOS 3 or iOS 4 debugging support that you can download and use. Looks like you can only debug iOS 5 and 6 apps with Xcode 4.5. Building for armv6 is will no longer be supported in Xcode 4.5. Also the minimum OS version you can target with it is iOS 4.3. Apple reacted quickly to the problems with IAP. They published a document that shows how to validate digital signatures on transactions using some private API that they permit you use for this specific purpose. At the same time as Mountain Lion also several other updates were released: Java 2012 004 which I need for Charles The SMC 1.5 update activated power nap for my 13″ Air The iWork apps now finally have iCloud support At 5:32 pm UTC App.net has reached their funding goal of $500,000. Tips If you get an iOS or Mac app approved then tweet with #iosreviewtime or #macreviewtime ! A free site averages those: reviewtimes.shinydevelopment.com To fix the problem of Reachability losing the ability of knowing that there is a connectivity. @cocoanetics just called [reachability stopNotifier]; [reachability startNotifier]; — Pawel Dudek (@eldudi) August 6, 2012 To resign the keyboard from anywhere: [[UIApplication sharedApplication] sendAction:@selector(resignFirstResponder) to:nil from:nil forEvent:nil]; — Sean Heber (@BigZaphod) August 1, 2012 Always happy to have you follow me @cocoanetics on Twitter and app.net and receiver your questions via [email protected].

Episode 39, recorded June 30th, 2012 Ad News Apple sent all developers an email detailing some changes. App and In-App Catalog Reports Now Available Catalog reports provide you with extended information for all of your apps and In-App Purchases. To view and generate reports, go to the Catalog Reports module on iTunes Connect. New reports can be generated only once every 24 hours. The report you get gives you one big list of everything you have on iTunes Connect. All apps. All In-App Purchases. Apple seems to be afraid of too much vanity and so they limit the generation of this report to once per day. iTunes Connect Mobile 2.0 iTunes Connect Mobile 2.0 is now available on the App Store. iTunes Connect Mobile allows you to access all of your app information, customer reviews, and sales data on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. You can now also access the metadata for your apps, designate favorite apps for easy tracking, and provide access for additional user roles. The update to iTunes Connect Mobile already became available during WWDC and several developers have mentioned to me that they especially like the feature that you can now do a manual release of a held back app from on the phone. You know, when the app is in Pending Developer Release status. High-Resolution App Icon and Newsstand Cover Art for Retina Display Starting in July, newly submitted iOS apps require high-resolution icons and cover art. Large icons and Newsstand cover art must have a minimum resolution of 1024 x 1024 pixels. To change your app icons or cover art, go to the Manage Your Applications module on iTunes Connect. For more information, see the Custom Icon and Image Creation Guidelines in the iOS Developer Library. There we where happily creating 512×512 artwork and now it turns out we have to go back and recreate everything at the higher resolution. Apparently there is some place in iOS 6 – still under NDA – where these high res icons will be used. Any way, you should be creating your icons with a resolution-independent vector art program anyway. This serves as a reminder to that. On June 22nd Apple added added app stores for 32 new countries, and since we all have time I’m going to read them to you. There will be a test later: Albania Benin Bhutan Burkina Faso Cambodia Cape Verde Chad Congo Fiji Gambia Guinea-Bissau Kyrgyzstan Laos Liberia Malawi Mauritania Micronesia Mongolia Mozambique Namibia Nepal Palau Papua New Guinea Sao Tome e Principe Seychelles Sierra Leone Solomon Islands Swaziland Tajikistan Turkmenistan Ukraine Zimbabwe I find it quite amusing to see certain countries on this list. Even some that I had thought to be imaginary ones from romance novels before. Yes, Micronesia, I’m looking at you! Most amusing of all is that with the new countries located in Africa it now for the first time becomes easier to buy apps than to be able to find a clean glass of water. Oh well, if we make a killing selling many more apps because of these additions then we might just as well donate some for charity: water. Problem solved! Flipboard versus Twitter The Best WWDC Party Watch Videos like crazy, one per day Tech Talks in Fall 13″ Air instead of Retina MacBook Girls in Tech, my blog post Someone told me that iOS dev isnt a job with future .. Is that true? #apple #iOS #developer — Julia Grill (@juliastic) June 30, 2012 If you have a second please do respond to this and give your own opinion.

Episode 38, recorded June 6th 2012 I’m chatting with Jesse Goodman, a former patent lawyer, about patents. Ad Jesse Goodman does all the administrative work at Stackmob in San Francisco. He was a patent lawyer in an earlier life and so I took the opportunity to chat with him about the ins and outs of patents. Here’s the video version of the interview: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0Yq7IkxX6M Please forgive the sub-optimal quality. This came together totally spontaneously and I didn’t have any good audio recording equipment available while being on my WWDC road trip. Though the video is interesting because it is the first video that I filmed with two cameras and used the new multi-cam support in Final Cut Pro X to cut it. Great fun!

Episode 36, recorded Sunday May 6th, 2012 In this episode my special guest is Will Kiefer. He is the Senior iOS Engineer in charge of Google Currents. Will tells us why UIWebView isn’t all that bad and has some amazing performance tips for us with which to tame it. You should make lots of notes and you will feel like you visited a lab at WWDC and had your brain supercharged. Ad Show Notes Google Currents iOS app on the app store, recently available internationally. Performance Notes: Cache UIWebViews, saves time on setup When profiling also look at CoreAnimation tool and VM tracker JavaScript is slow (e.g. JQuery), because JIT compiler is not available for web views Avoid changing the frame of web views, that causes it to do overtime When communicating from web view to Objective-C it is faster to change the hash on a small hidden iframe The frame of a web view should be smaller than the size of the screen, or if that is not possible have a clipping view NSURLProtocol is a better choice for caching than NSURLCache because it is concurrent With CoreData Will has one MOC for UI stuff and a second for updating in background, changes are then merged in by UI MOC Google Currents Producer Tool, requires Chrome at present. Will Kiefer on Twitter, on Google+

Episode 35, recorded Saturday, 28th of April 2012. “TapCaps” Alice Ning discusses the ins and outs of having a Kickstarter campaign for physical products versus software, we learn a bit about the magic behind capacitive touch screens and we learn what goes on behind the scenes of the TapCaps Kickstarter campaign. Ad News The big news this week of course have been the record sales of WWDC 2012 tickets. Most of the people at the US west coast missed out on tickets because the rush was over in just 2 hours. Compared to 10 hours last year. This year Apple tried something new. Individuals could only purchase one ticket and company accounts could only purchase 5. Non-transferable, no refunds. Unfortunately the system to detect scalpers was a bit overzealous. Several people who used the same credit card and same IP address but different developer account received a cancellation notice from Apple. The problem with starting too early was that some people tried to purchase multiple individual tickets like this because at that time they couldn’t get hold of the company account agent. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Apple can work this out, it is a bit of an embarrassing situation. Apple – as usual – trying an engineering approach with technology to solve the problem of scalping, but them stumbling over a stupid bug. Apple obviously wanted time the availability of tickets such that its early morning in the US, evening in Europe and before midnight in the far east. But what even surprised them was the speed at which the tickets went. Probably helped along very much by the WWDCalerts system that sent out messages to over 9000 people. I received my own such message about 10 minutes after the begin of the sales, that was 2:40 pm central european time. There where several people not so luck as SMS are known to be unreliable at times. Some received their notifications never or simply too late. Now two hours still twice as long as Google IO, but hey, people get free hardware there. I think we can attribute the breaking of last years record mostly to twitter and the alert system. I got lucky myself as well. I had my phone on silent so I totally missed the starting bell. But fortunately for me some nice chap sent me a direct message on Twitter. Which only further solidifies my theory that when people organize over social networks then they will break any record. Some other items, before we get to the interview. Pro Tip by Cédric Luthi: You must use MyImage@2x~ipad.png NOT [email protected] when using the automatic process of imageNamed. You know, imageNamed can automatically give you the @2x version on iOS devices with a Retina display. But did you know that it can also give you automatically a different image for iPhones and iPads? Yes, it does! You just call imageNamed:@”MyImage.png” and if there is a ~iPad between the 2x and the extension then this will be returned on iPads. But the order matters. It’s Name, @2x, tilde device, extension. Remember this. Shortly after being acquired by Facebook Instagram has opened up and nicely documented their API. You have an URL scheme to open instagram from your own app as well as web-based APIs to add and delete objects. In theory you could build your own Instagram client with that. Any takers? You probably won’t be purchased by Facebook though… Peter Steinberger reminds us: “If Xcode 4.4 creates an entitlement with NSFileProtectionComplete and your app fails to start up, just delete it. Stuff isn’t ready yet.” and he references a developer forum thread discussing this. Well you shouldn’t be using Xcode 4.4 in product environments yet, making production apps with… but that doesn’t prevent many individuals from doing exactly that. This is apparently already in iOS 5 as the mentioned thread is in the Core OS iOS 5 beta archive. No longer under NDA. So I can mention the official responds from an Apple engineer: One of my colleagues here in DTS discussed this issue with iOS engineering and the conclusi...