QuickLook plugin for provisioning profiles

This is soooo cool. Quick look into any provisioning profiles. Easy. Fast. Useful.

Icons, lot of them for your iOS app design needs

Today, I want to share with you three icon resources that I found out on the web.

The first is from Noami Atkinson.

The second set if from Symbolicons. The set is very interesting because very complete (400 of them in monochrome) and many are in colours. All vector based. 

The third one is from UIParade.com where would not only find icons and glyphs but also all sort of UI design kits. There are available in standard formats for only 8$. 

The last one is from http://geomicons.com/. Very nice and simple icons there too.

Another kind of application analytics

Saw that this morning, heat maps applied to user interaction with iOS application design. Learn how users are interacting with your application. Where do they touch most, or try pinching. You could get clues about badly designed application. Really cool.

https://heatma.ps/

About making rounded rectangles

Today I want to share this really interesting and well done blog post from Mike Rungle about making nice looking rounded rectangles in your iOS application interfaces: Making Round Rectangle Look Great. Mike's works is very impressive and I love everything he does graphically speaking. I wish I could be as good as this guy!

Small GitHub crash course from Cocoanetics

I just read the Cocoanetics crash course on GitHub's Fork, Pull requests. For beginners, if you want to get an idea what GitHub is all about, head to Cocoanetics blog post.

How to influence your presence on the App Store

This week, UPM 3.1.2 came out and I noticed something interesting. According to www.appannie.com, my application was being featured in 122 countries on the App Store in the Productivity category.

I did a little search in order to find an explanation for this. Before the update, my app wasn't featured at all in the App Store all over the world. Meh. By having a mere 175 updates downloaded by users on the first day and nearly 600 hundreds the following day, this seems to generate enough traffic on the Apple servers to trigger something. Could this traffic be influencing Apple algorithm for select which apps to feature on each App Store category? If yes, maybe I should plan smaller but more frequent updates for my application! What is your experience on this matter?

Need a backend platform for your iOS app?

Just stumbled upon this today: www.parse.com. Parse offers a complete backend server platform for mobile apps. iOS and Android are supported. The feature set includes:

• Data Storage in a schemaless format in the cloud;
• Push Notifications Servers;
• User management inside your app for easy signup features;
• Social media integration for user sign in.

The service is currently in beta and free for that period. Seems very nice. The documentation is very well done!

Shameless plug - Ultimate Password Manager 3.1.2 is out!

The latest release of my password manager for iPhone out! The app was less than 24 hours in queue (it was submitted on sunday!). This is a maintenance release. 

Release 3.1.2

> iOS 5 compatibility fixes.
> Password Safe: you can now lock the safe on demand from the action menu at the top right.
> Password Safe: data entry is faster as the Done key of the keyboard now completes the entry instead of hiding the keyboard.
> Password Safe: longer delay when showing a password in password safe.
> Password Safe: Fixed application crash caused by an action on a tapped and hold password safe entry.
> Policies: Added a Save button at the bottom of the toolbar when creating policies.
> Tweaks in the About section to let the user send comments, feedback or feature requests from within the applications.
> In the Generate tab, selecting the type of password generation rules is easier.
> A security reminder will be randnomly presented to the user if the application's PIN isn't defined.
> Other tweaks and more robust code.

Invalid bundle - UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities - what to do?

If you submit you application and you get the following error from the Application Loader, here is what you can do to resolve this issue.

Remove the key from the info.plist and re-submit the application binary. Why is that? According to this article, you cannot submit a new version of an application to the App Store that supports less devices than the previous versions. This is by design. In other words, Apple is telling us, developers, if you build an app, make sure it will work on all the devices that was originally worked on on day one. User experience comes first.

In my case, I never included the UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities. Submitting a new application binary with one, Apple state that I cannot restrict my application to fewer devices... But, you know what? Simply stating ARMv6 and ARMv7 doesn't reduce the amount of device supported... as this is the only two architectures currently supported on iOS devices. Is this a bug? Maybe.

No, we're not millionaires!

Being an indie iOS developer means a lot. Some could say we are our own boss and this is great. Others would say that we get all the benefits for our app sales (minus 30% for Apple). I would say that being an indie means everything is hard work, nothing is a given. Some others think the same. See You Guys Are Millionaires Right?