Changelog

Mobile apps were one of the big discussion points when we talked Mastodon on episode #315 of The Changelog. Here’s one thing Eugen had to say about the subject: Oh, yeah, for some reason I get a lot of questions like “Why isn’t Mastodon on the app store?” and it’s really weird, because there are like a million apps for Mastodon on every app store… They’re just not called Mastodon, because they are developed by third-party developers. Mastodon has a principle - API first, and… Yeah, that’s essentially it - API first. [laughter] Add Mast to the ever-growing list of third-party developers making iOS apps for Mastodon.

If this book intrigues you (like it does me), start nowhere else but the “How to Read This Book”: A successful iOS game makes $4,000 annually (this goes for any app frankly). A successful Android game makes one seventh of that (one third at best). You are not a large multi-million dollar company (at least I don’t think you are given that you’re reading this book). So you don’t have the customer acquisition/marketing budget to beat this $4,000 annual average. Period. Brutal. What’s a dev to do, then? Make lots of niche, high quality games.

Lyndsey Ferguson: Unit testing and the tests themselves are written by humans. Humans are prone to error. Unit tests and the testing infrastructure can be imperfect. The test_center plugin includes tools that remove (or alleviate) the effects of an imperfect test infrastructure. (fastlane is a popular way to automate building/releasing iOS and Android apps.)

Want developers of great software to be able to make a living doing it? Want free trials in the App Store? Join The Developers Union! Dear Apple, We believe that people who create great software should be able to make a living doing it. So we created The Developers Union to advocate for sustainability in the App Store. Today, we are asking Apple to publicly commit — by the tenth anniversary of the App Store this July — to allowing free trials for all apps in the App Stores before July 2019. After that, we’ll start advocating for a more reasonable revenue cut and other community-driven, developer-friendly changes.

Feeling nostalgic for Windows 95? Blake Tsuzaki was: This is a little exploration into applying ’90s-era design & principles into a modern platform with some primitive components. The assets and design metrics were (for the most part) taken from an actual installation of Windows 95. You may be wondering why all the effort? You’ll find answers to that question and more in the README.

Peder Norrby created TheParallaxView, a UI experiment for his iPhone X, that gives it a trompe-l’oeil effect. Trompe-l’oeil is an age-old trick used by painters to create the illusion of 3D depth on a 2D plane. On the iPhone X, it’s downright mesmerizing. The touchscreen itself seems to melt away as the phone transforms into a portal to an infinite abyss. Angle the phone, or your own head, and you can even peek inside, as if you’re looking through a peephole into another room, or inspecting a can of Pringles for the last few crumbs. The source is on GitHub — plus check out this blog post and this Twitter thread for more of the backstory.

This is being called “the biggest leak in history”, which is probably not true (remember when Gizmodo got its grubby paws on the iPhone 4?). But it’s likely the biggest leak in Apple software history. Motherboard says it… could pave the way for hackers and security researchers to find vulnerabilities in iOS and make iPhone jailbreaks easier to achieve. That’s plausible. iBoot is responsible for ensuring a trusted boot of the O/S. The specific version posted was from iOS 9, but this portion of code probably doesn’t get updated as often as the Music app, so it’s likely still relevant. Apple promptly posted a DMCA takedown request, and the source code is no longer publicly available. But we developers know all to well that once source code is made public, there’s no taking it private again.

This article isn’t a how-to, per se. It’s more like a research report written after attempting to build such an app for the first time. There’s nothing wrong with that, though, and this write-up is super useful if you’re about to tackle a similar problem space. Open source libraries are tried, facial recognition services are evaluated, and their takeaways are solid, if not a bit disappointing. As you can see, the really simple idea of using facial recognition functionality was not that simple to implement. The entire piece is worth a read.

Bender allows you to easily define and run neural networks on your iOS apps, it uses Apple’s MetalPerformanceShaders under the hood. Click through for some examples and an explanation of why they don’t use CoreML.

Mozilla recently announced that they're finally bringing Firefox to iOS. They'll have to use iOS's built-in rendering engine like everybody else, which begs the question: What makes this Firefox? Time will tell whether they're too late to the game or not. In the meantime, the source code is freely available (and under heavy development). From the README: This is a work in progress on some early ideas. Don't get too attached to this code. Tomorrow everything will be different. Could be a fun project to track, especially if you're interested in Swift.

Frameless for iOS 8 is the browser that gets out of your way. Frameless boasts a transparent UI, customizable gestures, and is built specifically for prototyping. Source here.

Bryan Irace and fellow iOS developers at Tumblr launched cocoa.tumblr.com to chronicle the fun (and sometimes not fun) parts of building iOS and OS X applications. They also started the @cocoatumblr Twitter account so you can follow along on Twitter as well.

What good is a browser that doesn’t have <div>s, <table>s, or <form>s? A lot of good if you want to build HTML5 games for iOS that are App Store compatible and quite performant.

Overshare looks like a great solution to the common need of iOS apps to share their content with 3rd parties. It boasts: Beautiful share sheets with pixel-perfect, full-color icons in a simple layout. Built-in integration with iOS Twitter and Facebook accounts. Built-in integration with popular third-party services like App.net, Instapaper, and more. And much more.

Apple’s Quartz Composer has enjoyed renewed enthusiasm as a prototyping tool after recent news and video tutorials on how Facebook prototyped Home using the tool. Joris Kluivers takes QC-based prototyping for iOS one step further with qc-mobile, which makes it possible to load, display, and interact with .qtz files on iOS. It’s still early days for the project (as Joris explains in his introductory blog post), but it is functional enough to render Jay Thrash’s iMessage recreation as seen in the demo video below. Now is a great time to get involved and make significant contributions to the project! qc-mobile is MIT licensed and hosted on GitHub.

If you’re a fan of Facebook 6.0 with Chat Heads you’re gonna love this. This project is an attempt to re-implement this feature and to figure out how the animations are done. I don't support this project in a way to completely implement all features of ChatHeads. It should only illustrate how parts of ChatHeads are done. Yours truly even has a commit. Sure, it’s just a spelling change, but that’s all it takes. Check out the source on GitHub. ht/ @Soffes

Today, the always-impressive Mattt released a new project: Helios. Helios is an open-source framework that provides essential backend services for iOS apps, from data synchronization and user accounts to push notifications, in-app purchases, and passbook integration. It allows developers to get a client-server app up-and-running in just a few minutes, and seamlessly incorporate functionality as necessary. Getting started is easy: $ gem install helios $ helios new myapp $ cd myapp; helios server $ open http://localhost:5000/admin Helios is broken down into useful components, too. If you check out the .gemspec, you’ll notice a few other gems that would be useful for anyone trying to build a backend service. There’s a lot of startups that do “Backend as a Service,” such as Parse, so it’s nice to see an OSS competitor pop up.

Bryan Irace, iOS developer at Tumblr, announced in this post that Tumblr recently open-sourced their SDK for iOS as well as a few official client libraries for the Tumblr API. We've been using this SDK in production for quite some time now and are thrilled to finally be able to share it with you. If you’re interested in integrating with Tumblr on iOS or OS X in a way that the SDK doesn’t currently facilitate, please get in touch. I’m very interested in hearing any and all feedback on how we can make this as easy as possible. Keep an eye on Tumblr’s org on GitHub if you’re looking to integrate with the Tumblr API.

Last week on episode #39 of The Industry, my buddy Drew Wilson mentioned this CSS photo editor he bookmarked a few months back. It’s a test site for new CSS features in iOS6 and other modern browsers for CSS filters and input[type=“file”] that lets you edit photos using CSS filters. Check out the site, the source, the blog post explaining the project, and the episode at around 17:20 to hear us discuss this.

This is a great library by Jerry Jones for customizing page controls. Today he added support for image masks and syncing the page state to a UIScrollView. Really great stuff. Read more about it on his blog and of course grab the code on GitHub.

Today David Keegan released KGNoise. It’s hands down the simplest way to draw noise on iOS or Mac. There’s two simple class methods to draw noise: + (void)drawNoiseWithOpacity:(CGFloat)opacity; + (void)drawNoiseWithOpacity:(CGFloat)opacity andBlendMode:(CGBlendMode)blendMode; David even provides a UIView or NSView (depending on which platform you’re building for) subclass that wraps up this behavior nicely. Here’s the interface: @property (strong, nonatomic) NSColor/UIColor *backgroundColor; @property (nonatomic) CGFloat noiseOpacity; @property (nonatomic) CGBlendMode noiseBlendMode; Since NSView doesn’t have a backgroundColor property, he adds one for you. Super handy. Lots of designs, including Apple’s, have been using noise lately. KGNoise makes it dead simple to accomplish this now. Definitely give it a look!

Cupertino is a great new tool by the amazing Mattt Thompson: Automate administrative tasks that you would normally have to do through the Apple Dev Center websites. Life’s too short to manage device identifiers by hand! You can easily list devices like this: $ ios devices:list Easily add one like this: $ ios devices:add "Sam's iPhone":abcdefg... There’s support for the following commands: devices:add devices:remove certificates:list [-e development|distribution] certificates:add [-e development|distribution] certificates:download CERTIFICATE_NAME certificates:revoke CERTIFICATE_NAME app_ids:list app_ids:new Definitely worth checking out if you spend any amount of time in the iOS Provisioning Portal. Thanks Mattt!

BubbleWrap is “a collection of (tested) helpers and wrappers used to wrap CocoaTouch code and provide more Ruby like APIs” for RubyMotion. There is a ton of great stuff in BubbleWrap. One of the most interesting things I’ve seen in awhile is EventMachine implemented using GCD. If you’re doing any RubyMotion work, I think you should definitely checkout BubbleWrap!

Laurent has just announced the release of Ruby Motion’s lib folder which powers the command line tool chain. The source is on GitHub. Stay tuned, Laurent will be our guest on the next episode.

JASidePanels is a UIViewController container designed for presenting a center panel with revealable side panels - one to the left and one to the right. The main inspiration for this project is the menuing system in Path 2.0 and Facebook’s iOS apps. Recently, I was looking for a library for the Path and Facebook style menu. After trying several, JASidePanels was the clear winner. It’s highly customizable, supports orientation changes, and works on iPad too! Configuring is dead simple: JASidePanelController *viewController = [[JASidePanelController alloc] init]; viewController.leftPanel = [[JALeftViewController alloc] init]; viewController.centerPanel = [[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:[[JACenterViewController alloc] init]]; viewController.rightPanel = [[JARightViewController alloc] init]; self.window.rootViewController = viewController; The source and a demo project is on GitHub.