In the process of implementing Snipster, my newest app creation (see the announcement post), I ran into some interesting problems and tried out some new frameworks and features. What follows are some observations, in no particular order:

After having quickly set up Core Data (it’s a breeze!) and then running into a dead end with ordered relationships and NSFetchedResultsController,¹ I now appreciate better why Core Data is both revered and despised.

mogenerator taught me how to use Mike-Ash-style namespaced constants. I love it!

Auto Layout in iOS 6 is a neat concept in theory, but fiendishly fickle in practice. Interface Builder keeps re-interpreting what I want it to do. And when you’re done, you’re still not safe from inconsistency problems.

Unwind segues are a great time saver in general, but don’t work as expected with custom view controller containers.

I love how Apple continues to incrementally improve on existing APIs. Just take the simplified dequeuing of table-view cells, which in iOS 5 was only available for storyboard prototype cells.

It’s also simply awesome (in the sense of less code, cleanear code, better code) to get rid of those viewDidUnload methods. I never really saw the sense in -viewDidUnload ever since I started using ARC and weak IBOutlets for my subviews (which were retained and thus owned by their superview and when deallocated automatically got their references nilled).

Making a fully custom Back button is harder than expected. (No, just setting a custom UIButton as your navigationItem.leftBarButtonItem doesn’t cut it – look at how the Back button transitions during navigation.)

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