Last few days, the mood turned way too sombre among iOS app developers. I see it going in cycles, but the worrying trend is that period between those days is getting shorter. This time is was sparked by Jared Sinclair’s post about the sales numbers for one of the best RSS readers on iOS: Unread.

Given the feature placements on the App Store, glowing reviews at prominent blogs - I expected this app to have earned at least 300-400k. Instead, it barely eked out over 40k. For such a quality app, this is really disheartening.

Many people chimed in, before and after with varying thoughts, but frankly - the mood is not good. I may be wrong, but I think that Jared is now in the position where I was about 3-4 years ago, but with way more success and recognition than I had back then and now. Which is fantastic position to bounce up, if he chooses to do so.

I am preparing my main apps to be compatible with iOS 8 and upcoming new devices of possibly varying physical sizes. First order of business: remove any hard-coded 320 values in various places.

In Units convert (note: the upcoming version 3.0 will be called Unitica) I have a very complex cell in the favorites screen.

When you swipe over that cell, you get the option to remove that particular favorited pair; doing that triggers cell removal and adjustment of the position of cells below. And it throws this lovely exception doing that:

Meyerweb: So Many Nevers

Freaking shit how this is ripping me out, the last several days. So much pain, so hard to express.

I grew professionally with Eric’s books and sites for years and years. It’s strange how you can get yourself into thinking you actually know a person, without never actually speaking to him. But to so many of us who believed in web standards and stuff back at the start of the century Eric was one of the several beacons we looked up to, someone who relentlessly pushed the movement forward.
I lived and breathed the web back then and Eric Meyer was a household name, a mentor of sort.

To have him and his family going through this is so unjust. Only…there’s no justice nor guilt nor anything really when it comes to cancer. It just happens, a Mother of all bad jackpots.

RIP Becca

objc.io issue #12 is chock-full of awesomeness. Animations, especially interactive ones, are the heart and soul of delightful iOS 7 apps. I can’t recall when was the last time I read so many articles in such a short period of time.

One particular use case was not covered though and it just happened to be one I was tackling while building new version of Try Couch to 5k. In it, everything is collection views, often nested one inside another. What I wanted to do is sequentially animate each cell as it appears on the screen.

For example, as 5k plan has sequences of pace units, I wanted them to appear one by one, to draw runner’s eye to each one. At the same time, since lots of info is presented on the run-preview screen, I wanted to gradually load them to not overwhelm the runner with several parts of the screen animating at the same time (that would just be visual noise).

So, how to tackle this?