Apps

Realising The iPad Pro's Potential

As part of my day job at Bloomberg, our team just released a pretty mammoth update to our iPad app. In one monthly release cycle we added pencil support, picture in picture video, iOS multitasking, plus our own in-app split screen multitasking. I've written a fairly techy blog post over at Bloomberg about it, go have a read!

NSURL on iOS 7

There's a subtle change in the way URLWithString: works on devices running iOS 7. On iOS 6, spaces at the end of the string used to be percent-encoded and a valid NSURL object was created, but on iOS 7 the method will return nil. For example:

NSURL *urlOne = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://number23.org"];
NSURL *urlTwo = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://number23.org "];

iOS6 http://number23.org http://number23.org%20

iOS7  http://number23.org (null)

A non-encoded space inside the string will mean nil is returned on both platforms: it's just this edge-case that is the oddity. Arguably this is actually a bug that has been fixed, and you should be encoding your strings anyway, but it's worth checking your URLs (or running stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet: over them as standard) so you don't get burned by this little beauty.

iOS App Review times at an all-time low

There's a fascinating side-effect of the Apple Dev Center troubles happening right now: review times are some of the best we've ever seen. I've personally just had 2 app updates accepted in 2 days each, and a brand new app in 3. Take a look at #iosreviewtime, almost everything is coming in between 2 and 4 days, which is virtually unheard of for iOS app reviews.

What's curious about this is the timing: as you're no doubt aware, the Dev Center has not been having a great time of late, but as of this weekend is (mostly) back up.

So how come these review times are so good? All the support staff have nothing else to do while the sysadmins are pulling 18 hour days? Whatever the reason, I'm not complaining.

 

UPDATE

Good point from the commenters: there will have been fewer new apps appearing since you would have had to have created your profiles before last Thursday, and so more time for app updates and the organised among us.

UPDATE #2

The word on Twitter is that while the reviews are quick, they might be not actually very good, and plenty of crashy apps are getting through. Got a buggy app? Make hay while the sun shines!