Here are some of the things from across the iOS blogosphere I found interesting this past month.
- The hottest topic: Apple revised and published their App Store review criteria (iOS developer membership required, though Engadget has converted it into a PDF for everyone to read). I like the tone and spirit of that document very much. John Gruber also documents welcome changes to the developer license agreement (among others, third party development tools like Flash are allowed again). Despite the relaxation of the rules, Jesper still argues for an App-Store-independent way of installing iOS apps without the need to jailbreak your device (and I agree).
- Josh Clark, author of the awesome book Tapworthy on iPhone app design talks about some concepts from his book in an 80-minute webcast.
- Marco Arment analyzed the words that are most common to 5-star and 1-star reviews on the App Store. The lesson: make your app simple and amazing!
- Nice set of slides by Jim Dovey on how to design robust and fast networking code in iOS. Gives an overview of Apple’s networking APIs and shows how to use Grand Central Dispatch to make them more awesome.
- Manish Patel discusses the development costs of an iOS app. Related: a similar discussion on Stack Overflow with some good numbers from insiders.
- Google published an open-source library to implement OAuth in your app.
- A number of developers started publishing the source code of their App Store apps for us to learn – and happily, some of them even seem to profit from this move financially because more people buy their app. I think this is great. John from ManiacDev has compiled a very useful (and regularly updated) list of open source App Store apps.
- This one is from July but I only discovered it recently: Adrian Kosmaczewski wrote an Objective-C wrapper for the C-based Core Text API (new in iOS 3.2). And anything that makes Core Text code more readable is very welcome.