The last week has been rather turbulent for iOS developers with Lodsys starting to raise some serious patent questions and threatening to directly go after app developers.
With Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) only two weeks away, here is our weekly list of iOS development reading recommendations.
If we missed anything, please feel free to tell us in the comments!
- Florian Mueller has a great write up about the possible implications of the latest Lodsys activities. It’s a bit lengthy but if you’re a professional in the game, I highly recommend reading it in full. He has also written “Is Apple winning the patent game?” looking more broadly at Apple’s various patent related battlefields.
- Did you migrate to Xcode 4 recently and wondered about all the new keyboard shortcuts? Jesse Collis has posted a great talk on the subject. Together with Stewart Gleadow he ran a presentation at the Melbourne Cocoaheads meeting. Find his slides and video here.
- I don’t know about you, but even after years of Cocoa and iOS programming, I sometimes feel like I have to dig deeper into the Objective-C run-time, trying to understand its inner workings even better. During my years of monitoring various iOS communities, I found that the most frequently asked questions hint at a general lack of understanding how some aspects work behind the scene. As part of his Friday Q&A the amazing Mike Ash has dissected NSZombies. It’s a fascinating read and one, no professional iOS developer should miss.
- Keith Harrison looks into dealing with failure in Objective-C initializers. A great refresher including a hint at a possible memory leak we all might have included inside our current code.
- Ever had to deal with images and color spaces inside your iOS apps? Turns out, converting images from RGB to CYMK is almost easier to do with Cocoa, than in Photoshop. Read about it over at Ole Bergmann’s blog and find the astonishingly short code snippet.
- A little bit older but still worth bookmarking: John Muchow’s brief article about a better way to encode URLs. Apple’s method built into NSString doesn’t handle percent escapes for all characters. Core Foundation to the rescue.
Not so development related, but good in case your friends ask for an Android versus iOS discussion, Lifehacker gives you 10 ways iOS outdoes Android.
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Last but not least, if you’re on Facebook and looking for a really active community, check out the iOS Developers group. I have to admit, I helped create it, but please don’t take this as a shameless plug. The currently 245 members are mostly professionals and very responsive.
Looking forward to the next week in iOS development and hope to see you all at WWDC 2011.
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