Weekly Roundup: Baseless Rumors and Wild Conjecture about the iPhone 6

Aaron Brethorst, August 24, 2014

A brief update for all of you on a few topics of note over the past weeks: App Store revenue, iPhone 6 rumors, iOS testing, and Swift.

First, Allen Ding, the creator of Kiwi, a BDD framework for Cocoa, writes about his experiences with making money in the App Store. In his first attempt to make money on his app, Saved, he used a freemium model, saw the app downloaded 107,000 times after spending about $1,500 on Facebook ads and iAds, and made...$527. Ouch. He then moved to a paid model, and saw his downloads decline by two orders of magnitude, while revenue quadrupled. It's worth your time to read the whole thing. (Also, Allen, if you happen to read this, I wish you'd put a link to your app in your blog post. I couldn't find a link to download it anywhere.)

Second, iPhone 6 rumors and conjecture continue apace in the buildup to the September 9 media event where it's expected that the new phone(s) will be launched. John Gruber wrote a very thorough examination of expected screen resolutions and DPIs for a 4.7" and 5.5" iPhone 6. Meanwhile, Macrumors published what appear to be photos of either the iPhone 6 or a current-gen iPod touch. Either way, shiny, shiny photos for your enjoyment.

Third, a reader, Ben, followed up on last week's post on testing strategies with a link to a very interesting-looking testing framework called Subliminal, which offers a UI Automation-like integration testing experience in Objective-C. I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet, but it could be incredibly useful if it can remove some of the sharp edges around using UI Automation.

Finally, Melvin Rivera passed along a link to a handy website called That Thing in Swift, which offers its readers idiomatic Swift versions of common iOS development tasks. I hope it gets filled in with more examples.

Best,
Aaron


What We're Reading


Control of the Week

Weekly Roundup

VBFJellyView

OLEContainerScrollView

VBFJellyView is a custom view made out using UIKit Dynamics and with a very funny effect when adding behaviours to it.

MIT licensed.

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FlatButton

FlatButton

Create Bootstrap 3.0-like buttons.

License unspecified.

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LBHamburgerButton

LBHamburgerButton

LBHamburgerButton is an iOS control that displays 3 lines (hamburger) and other icon (back, close...) without using image. It has a beautiful, clean and smooth transition between 2 state like Google Material Design or "close button" of Paper app.

MIT licensed.

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UzysAssetsPickerController

UzysAssetsPickerController

Alternative UIImagePickerController , You can take a picture with camera and pick multiple photos and videos

MIT licensed.

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THNotesTextView

THNotesTextView

UITextView with the look of a Notebook

MIT licensed.

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VBPieChart

VBPieChart

Pie Chart iOS control with different animations to present.

MIT licensed.

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Extractor Localizable Strings

Extractor Localizable Strings

Extractor Localizable Strings is a open source plug-in for Xcode. It lets you extract localizable strings without opening the .strings file. When you select a string you can easily extract to main Localizable.strings file without opening it.

MIT licensed.

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TextFieldValidator

TextFieldValidator

This control will help you to manage all kinds of validation effectively. For this you just need to provide regex string and other things will be handled by control itself.

Check out my blog for more reference: http://dhawaldawar.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/uitextfield-validation-ios/

MIT licensed.

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SHFlatButton

SHFlatButton

A UIButton subclass to for Flat Buttons to create 3d styled Flat Buttons with shadows

MIT licensed.

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ENTabBarView

ENTabBarView

A clean & simple TabBar View for OS X in Objective-C

MIT licensed.

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DrawCircleFrame

DrawCircleFrame

Small framework which animates a line drawn around your custom text. My intention was to focus user attention on a button.

Apache 2.0 licensed.

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JCDialPad

JCDialPad

A highly customizable phone dial pad view with automatic phone number formatting, similar to the iOS 7 Phone app's Keypad view. Populate buttons with text or custom views, and easily respond to user actions in default or custom ways with one simple delegate method.

MIT licensed.

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Chameleon

Chameleon

Chameleon is a lightweight, yet powerful, flat color framework for iOS. It is built on the idea that software applications should function effortlessly while simultaneously maintaining their beautiful interfaces.

Chameleon is the first and only color framework on the market that focuses its full attention and efforts on "flat colors". With Chameleon, you can easily forget about UIColor RGB values, wasting hours figuring out the right color combinations to use in your app, and worrying about whether your text will be readable on the various background colors of your app.

Features:

  • 100% Flat Color Support
  • 24 Hand-Picked Flat Colors in Both Light x Dark Shades
  • Flat Color Schemes (Analogous, Complementary, Triadic)
  • Color-Aware Text (Transforms text to either black or white depending on the color behind it)
  • Color-Aware Status Bar
  • Flatify Feature (With a single line of code transform every color on the screen to the flat version of itself!)
  • Cocoapods Support
  • Storyboard Support
  • Xcode Quick Help Documentation
  • Gradient Colors

Cocoa Pods
pod 'ChameleonFramework'

MIT licensed.

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CDRTranslucentSideBar

CDRTranslucentSideBar

Translucent Side Bar for iOS7

CocoaPods pod 'CDRTranslucentSideBar'

Apache 2.0 licensed.

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THCalendarDatePicker

THCalendarDatePicker

A DatePicker based on a custom calendar view.

MIT licensed.

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ObjectivePGP - OpenPGP implementation

ObjectivePGP - OpenPGP implementation

ObjectivePGP is an OpenPGP implementation for iOS and OSX.

zlib licensed.

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CHCircleGaugeView

CHCircleGaugeView

A configurable chart that depicts the value of a measurement using a subtle animation.

MIT licensed.

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BFPaperTabBar

BFPaperTabBar

iOS UITabBar inspired by Google's Paper Material Design.

MIT licensed.

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THSegmentedPager

THSegmentedPager

Simple plugin-sample using the HMSegmentedControl and a UIPageViewController to show Tabs

MIT licensed.

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TMOSmarty

TMOSmarty

TMOSmarty is a template engine for iOS Apps.

Smarty PHP was originally written using a template engine, is one of the industry's most famous PHP template engine. It separates the logic code and external content, provides an easy to manage and use the method used to originally mixed with PHP code and HTML code for logical separation. Simply speaking, the purpose is to make PHP programmer with separate front-end staff, enables programmers to change the logical content of the program will not affect the front page design staff, the front-end staff re-edit the page without affecting the program logic program, which in the multiplayer cooperative project was particularly important.

Smarty in PHP is widely used, making our Smarty ported to iOS with great interest, so we wrote this one open source library TMOSmarty.

TMOSmarty could have done

1 Embedded references Embedded references, Model any type of object can be converted to NSString, and automatically rendered to various UI elements.

2 custom function processing Since the use of defined functions can be a complex system can be used for string manipulation methods to encapsulate and use very simple method call.

3.Model / View linkage (using KVO) In the past, we need to create a bunch of IBOutlet in Interface Builder and .m file references, will cease to exist, at the same time, with the Model / View linkage technology, Model changes will be immediate feedback to View, and you only need one line of code to complete all operations.

Use TMOSmarty, you can liberate your hands, reduced by at least 30% of meaningless code. Meanwhile, View (StoryBoard, Interface Builder) and Controller, Model separation will be more thorough.

MIT licensed.

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