Today, Apple users and developers are experiencing some major downtime. Apple services are known to experience stability problems at times. And there is the occasional intentional downtime for the Apple store ahead of new products coming. But I don’t remember any time when that many systems were affected for such a long duration.
Category Archive for ‘Apple’ 
iPhone Downsizing
I admit it, I belong to the group of people who use their iPhone singlehandedly. That is, a single-thumb-typer. Also, I scoffed at the idea of a super-sized iPhone 6+. But I am somebody to apply the scientific method for examine the validity of your own beliefs. So I purchased and used an iPhone 6+ (Gold, 128 GB) for almost 2 months. Here’s my verdict as well as an intro do size classes.
Xcode 6 drops armv7s
The latest Xcode update no longer builds for the armv7s architecture by default. Is it planned obsolesce or an oversight?
Happy New Year, Young Steve Jobs!
When toymaker Legendary Toys announced that they’ll do a new run of Steve Jobs action figures I know that I had to have one. There once was a very life-like “Old Steve Jobs”, but they got legal problems with the SJ estate. This is also why some of the figures you can still get are named “CEO Action Figure”. They look more or less like Steve, but they don’t dare to use the name.
Apple Product Non-Placement
A German TV movie (based on a Katie Forde novel) has a scene where a protagonist views from photos taken with a Canon camera. Though there are several things wrong here that cause Apple buffs to wince.
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.
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.
