This update brings the new features and fixes from DTCoreText 1.6 to the editor component.
International Internship Fail
When I read this article about Unpaid Internships back in May I got a feeling that I should try to do something about this injustice. In fact I know of several companies here in Austria who are also receiving cheap labor from college students who just need a place to do some “research” for a paper or degree.
This article summarizes what I learned about Internships and some of the pitfalls when trying to do International Internships from the point of view of an Austrian company. Most of this probably applies to companies globally.
DTFoundation 1.4.4
Gearing up for the upcoming 1.6 release of DTRichTextEditor I also figured that I could release a new maintenance release for DTFoundation. This version just tidies up a few project-related things, no real bugs.
Linguan and Xcode 5
Some people have reported that on a system where they installed Xcode 5 in parallel they found that Linguan gets stuck opening projects.
DTCoreText 1.6
Actually I wanted to release this as version 1.5.4, but frankly I got lazy trying to separate new features from bug fixes. So let’s call this 1.6.0 instead.
USA Prepaid Data Update
Two years ago, for WWDC 2011, I researched how to get 3G data on my iPhone. Last year AT&T tweaked their policies slightly to make it more complicated to use prepaid data with smart phones. Since I got myself a phone with nano SIM (iPhone 5) since then I needed to do something again.
Also 2013 marked the first day when I brought my employee to WWDC and wanted him to have prepaid data as well. In this post I’m summarizing the current state of affairs as of Summer 2013.
I’m a Game Studio!
Until today I had only every tried my hands on a UIKit-based game, a clone of the Wheel of Fortune game show. Unfortunately Sony Entertainment asked Apple to ban this from the app store. So I had to take it offline.
Whenever an independent game developer had a success I would feel jealousy boil up in my stomach. If only I could also make games. But I was too busy mastering Objective-C and Apple’s frameworks (on iOS and Mac) to be able to devote time to learning Cocos2D.
This has entirely changed last week, when Apple announced the new Sprite Kit framework.
Radar: QLPreviewController Exception
According to the QLPreviewItem Protocol Reference for iOS:
“If the item is not available for preview, this property’s getter method should return nil. In this case, the Quick Look preview controller displays a ‘loading’ view.”
If you return nil for the previewItemURL as suggested the app is terminated with an exception.
This bug is filed as rdar://14216503 and on OpenRadar.
iOS 7 Icon Squircle
Apple is not only revamping the look of iOS 7 apps to be kind of flat, also most app icons will have to get a redesign.
Over the recent years we could see a trend that some app designers felt that they had to add a border to their icons to make them “pop more”. So they they enabled the “Icon already includes gloss effects” setting to avoid the application of the trademark shine and used a photoshop template for make the border fit.
We followed this trend with the icon design for our most recent app Urban Airship Commander which also has a chrome border. Because frankly, without this border, we feared that a phosphorous radar screen might look too boring…
And it is Flat After All!
On the first day of WWDC we finally got to see the result of Jony Ives’ plastic surgery on iOS 7. The new approach tries to build on familiar actions, but simplifying their visual representation. As is normally the case with such a broad redesign, it is polarizing.
Some individuals are already calling it a failure, while others feel that this again results in a leap ahead that reasserts Apple’s position as a leader.
