iOS « How to make iPhone Apps and Influence People

24Jun/111

WWDC 2011 Video recommendations (Updated)

Update 26/6/11 : I've fixed a couple of errors, and updated the formatting of the post below.

WWDC Videos are out this morning! Here's my very quick 'Hit List' based on the sessions I attended and the sessions I stared in the WWDC 2011 app on my iPad.

Monday - Kickoff Sessions

601 - Apple Platforms Kickoff

300 - Developer Tools Kickoff

400 - Graphics, Media and Games Kickoff

Tuesday

100 - What's New in Cocoa Touch

102 - Implementing UIViewController Containment ** This is probably the most interesting thing in iOS 5 from my point of view.

101 - What's new in Cocoa

500 - What's new in Core Location ** Presented by a friend of mine, lots of people were excited by the new stuff here

104 - Advanced ScrollView Techniques ** The ScrollView talks are always great

501 - iCloud Storage Overview **

105 - Polishing your App: Tips and Tricks to Improve Responsiveness and Performance

303 - What's New in Core Data on iOS ** There was some cool stuff in here.

203 - Introducing App Sandbox (Lion)

323 - Introducing Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) **

Wednesday

111 - Visualising Information Geographically with MapKit

306 - Maximising Productivity in Xcode 4

308 - Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch in Practice ** The line for this was the longest all week

307 - Moving to Apple LLVM compiler

310 - What's new in Instruments

116 - Storing Documents in iCloud using iOS 5 ** Not exciting for me, but people like the concept

Thursday

208 - Securing Application Data

313 - Mastering Schemes in Xcode 4

210 - Mastering Grand Central Dispatch

121 - Understanding UIKit Rendering

124 - Twitter Integration125 - UITableView Changes, Tips & Tricks

316 - LLVM Technologies in Depth

422 - Using Core Image on iOS & Mac OS X **

129 - Practical Drawing for iOS Developers **

318 - iOS Performance in Depth

Friday

134 - Writing Easy-To-Change Code: Your second most important goal as a developer

322 - Objective C Advancements In-Depth

Tagged as: iOS, iosDev, videos, wwdc, WWDC2011 1 Comment

22Feb/112

A simple bash script to automatically create your iOS Icon.png files

The other week at my weekly co-working catchup in the city I was made aware of the very handy sips(1) command line tool. Sips is short for Scriptable Image Processing system and is more or less a command line front end to Apple's image processing abilities.

My problem that day was "How can I automatically resize my Icon.png artwork" and all of a sudden with the knowledge of sips' existence it was easy to write this small bash script to rename and resize my large 512x512 pixel artwork down to the various names and sizes required by iOS. (Thanks Mark!)

The script is simple; give it an input PNG image at least 512x512 pixels (multiple of 512 will work too) and it will create your iTunesArtwork, Icon.png, Icon@2x.png, Icon-Small.png, Icon-Small@2x.png, Icon-Small-50.png and Icon-72.png file nicely. These sizes are all outlined in the "Application Icons" section of the iOS Application Programming Guide, and adding more when necessary is obvious.

This script should save you at least a dollar on the similar GUI apps on the app store that do the same thing...

I've made a gist on github too.