This one simple trick has saved me quite a bit of time recently refactoring some of my old code. Now that I have all this spare time to go back and update a bunch of my apps, I am spending more time trying to reduce the images to lower the bundle size and save work making images. I was able to reduce my overall bundle size by almost 20% by just using it.

What is this magical trick you ask? It is actually utilizing the transform on UIView to rotate an image. Pretty simple right? Surprisingly, I didn’t use this enough in my previous apps when I was just trying to get them working and hopefully making money.

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// Flip everything 180 to correlate with the correct shading
self.bottomButtonView.transform =
    CGAffineTransformRotate(self.bottomButtonView.transform, M_PI);

This code will simply rotate an view 180 degrees. Previously in other apps, I was taking the same image, rotating it in illustrator, saving it as image_180.png and image_180@2x.png. What a pain and also a waste for the users to have to download the copies of the images. Now that I can utilize new knowledge on my old apps, I have been able to significantly reduce the images in my bundle.

Hopefully you already knew about this trick or if not, I hope you use it to save some serious resources!

Cheers!
-Kevin

Things I read this week: IBDesignable and IBInspectable Live visualization of views and editable values in interface builder! Very cool, I am excited to play more with this.

What other simple trick has really helped you save time and resources? Email me your comments and I will add them to the list