The Week in iOS Development, 30 May – 05 June

This will likely be the last The Week in iOS Development episode before version 5.0 of iOS, Apple’s biggest update since the release of the mobile operating system.

Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference is less than 24 hours away and we are cautious, excited and can hardly wait to see all the new stuff, that Apple has promised us to reveal.

Our own Matthew Panzarino and myself are going to live blog from the event. As of this writing, it’s still not clear, whether Apple might stream Steve’s keynote via their events site.

With everybody eagerly waiting for WWDC announcements, here’s our list of stuff, that hopefully is worth your time to take a look at:

• Sascha Konietzke’s  StorageRoom went out of beta. Claiming to be “Better Content Management for Mobile Applications”, StorageRoom has been in private beta for quite a while. In short, Sascha has created a MongoDB based, fully hosted and extensible solution that provides an out-of-the-box service for creating dynamic mobile applications. From its Web-based UI to its elegantly designed RESTful API, StorageRoom really impressed us. We are actually planning to cover it in a dedicated article later today, so stay tuned.
• Not new, but one of those must-reads for any serious iOS developers: Apple’s Technical Note TN2239. In this comprehensive guide titled “iOS Debugging Magic” Apple’s documentation team summarizes almost everything you need to know about debugging iOS programs. From secret environment variables to callable routines, this Technical Note arms yourself with a great set of tools to tackle memory related and other difficult to catch crashes.
• Marcus Zarra, the guy who brings us Cocoa is my Girlfriend and and excellent book on Cora Data, this week published a rare, personal article titled “Why So Serious?”. Triggered by his involvement during the creation of The Daily, he appeals to developers to treat each others nicely. A virtue which more and more seems to have gotten lost in our highly competitive decade. Jeff LaMarche, another highly respected developer and author of my favorite book to learn iOS programming, picked up on Marcus’ article. I couldn’t possibly have said it better than Jeff: “I think it should serve as a reminder that real people — very often our friends and colleagues — are behind the software and hardware that we express opinions on.”
• My favorite RSS app Reeder has it, the Google Mobile App and you find it in Evernote, too: A nice little status bar overlay that provides hints about the state of the application. Matthias Tretter recreated the effect and provides the fully open sourced MTStatusBarOverlay classes via GitHub. As there has been some confusion whether Apple rejects apps that mess with the status bar, make sure to read the warning at the beginning of the README file!
• Ever found your Xcode 4 becoming painfully slow over time? Here is a possible solution including an Automator workflow to simplify the necessary steps. I haven’t personally tested it, as my installation tends to run just smoothly since day 1 – so use at your own risk. Thanks Craig for the tip.
• Matt Gallagher from Cocoa with Love posted reusable classes for fetching and parsing XML and JSON data via HTTP. As Matt says: “[…] fetching data via HTTP is probably the second most common task that iOS applications perform after displaying a list of things in a table.” Agreed. And that’s why his code along with his fantastic guidance might be of help in one of your next projects.

This concludes it for week 22 in iOS Development. As always, I’d like to encourage you to join the growing and very active iOS Developers Facebook group.

I’m sure, we will have a lot to talk about next week, when WWDC lays behind and we have great new tools at our disposal.

Should you want to tip me off to stuff for next week’s installment, find me as @24z on Twitter.