Ad

Our DNA is written in Swift
Jump

Category Archive for ‘Apple’ rss

Apple’s New Age of Unfairness

You might have noticed that Apple didn’t do a tour of Tech Talks last year as they had been doing traditionally in the past. The reason for this had been a sea change in the ranks of Apple’s evangelism team, headed by John Geleynse. Up until last year Apple’s unofficial motto had always been “treat everybody the same”.

The popularity of iOS has brought with it an unprecedented explosion in number of developer accounts and so Apple decided at a secret board meeting held at the beginning of January to change their credo. One suggestion had been “don’t be as evil as Google”, but this was struck down by Tim Cook who feared that this would taint Apple’s reputation as it would have lowered them to their competitor’s level.

But joking aside, Geleynse came to realize that Apple just cannot muster the man power it would need to hold the kind of Mini-WWDC that these Tech Talks represented all around the globe. When I interviewed him at the last Tech Talk in London he told me that doing a Euro-WWDC would be too much of a financial burden on the company. I have no idea how such a statement fits together with frequent reports of Apple having problems finding which mattress to stuff their cash into next.

Read more

Sir Ive Puts His Foot Down

Apple’s “new” Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Sir Jonathan Ive took on the additional role of also being of in charge of the iOS Alu.. Alumino.. Chrome when Scott Forstall moved into an advisory position.

In the latest update to the Podcasts.app I believe we are seeing the first hint of the fresh breeze that Jony is bringing to Apple’s app design.

The unword that definitely plagued Apple in 2012 was Skeuomophism. It means to make something look like it has different physical properties than it really would have. Like the Gamecenter app showing green felt when touching it really feels like touching glass to me.

Other examples include leather-bound digital calendars, the style of the Find my Friends app and a few more attempts to make iOS look more valuable by including expensive materials or craftsmanship.

Read more

UITextView Caught With Trousers Down

I had begun development on DTRichTextEditor a few months before WWDC 2012. This was the time when Apple announced that UIKit would support attributed strings beginning with iOS 6. 3 classes to be exact – if you search the documentation for the attributedText property – UILabel, UITextField and UITextView.

Back then I I was hesitant to concede that Apple had sherlocked my open source work in DTCoreText. Yes, there where a few formatting styles now supported, but still the initWithHTML which exists on Mac was still nowhere to be seen on iOS. In the least people would still be able to bridge the gap from HTML to NSAttributedString with my classes.

As I dove more into making DTCoreText compatible with new attributes used by iOS 6 I found the approach that Apple chose to take quite limited and extremely incomplete.

Read more

Image Decompression Benchmark: iPad 4 + Mini

It’s been a while since the unveiling of the iPad mini and new new Retina iPad (aka iPad 4). I like to compare image decompression performance between device generations because personally I believe that this tells a more tangible story than any other benchmark where you end up with some score.

We were told that iPad 4 would be twice as fast as the iPad 3 and that the iPad mini would be at the same performance level as the iPad 2. So we shall compare the results for these devices to see if these statements hold. Also we would like to know if there is any sort of tangible benefit from including armv7s code in our apps.

Read more

Fresh Perspective – iPad Mini Keynote

Hey! My name is Julia Grill also known as juliastic on Twitter and my nice cousin-in-law offered me to post an article about the lastest Apple keynote on his website. So I hope you don’t judge my English as much, because I come from Austria and I’m still learning it.

I also have a website called julialerntios.com where I review apps and also want to begin to blog about technical stuff. Right now all the articles are in German, but I’m trying my best to only blog in English anymore.

So, enough from the self-advertisement:

Yesterday, as you probably know, was the Apple keynote. That was generally the first keynote I ever saw, so I was a bit of excited.

Read more

iOS 6 out now

True to the predictions iOS 6 became available worldwide at exactly 7 pm central European time. The nice guys at istheapplestoredown.de were the first to call it and send out the notification e-mail that you can subscribe to.

The first question foremost on every developer’s mind: is the released version the same as the Gold Master.

Read more

iPhone 5 Keynote Event

We just witnessed the iPhone 5 launch …almost live … at the Runtastic HQ where there was a Cocoahead special event. Let’s summarize what it means for us developers.

Tim Cook called iOS 6 and iPhone 5 the “biggest thing to happen to the iPhone since iCloud”.

Read more

Great Apple Support

I have a collection of all iOS ever made, all iPhones, all iPod Touches, of course the iPads. I call it “my museum”. Though only the oldest are actually on display since the newer one are all in use. Of the iPhone 4S I even have 3 in active use, though when all my users will have moved on, I’ll sell away all but one to also take its honorary position.

My 3GS was in use by my Cousin-in-law who I am sponsoring to interest her in a career in tech. She’s got a website where she does iOS tutorials as well as app reviews. So I am seeing that – however far – related to my business and thus can justify the expense. It greatly pained me when I learned that the volume button had jumped off the device. “Dropped? Me?! NEVER!”

Thankfully I was able to get it restored to better-than-before mint-ness. This is how.

Read more

NOT a Radar: Missing IR Remote Settings

I was about to file a second Radar from out latest AirPlay Experiments. When I was remote-controlling the AppleTV my colleague complained that stray radiation was also changing his speaker volume. When we looked at his Security Settings we couldn’t find the settings to disable IR.

But the solution was not to file a Radar and proceed to sulking. The problem lay in my own ballpark.

Read more

Softly Killing iPhone 3G

The latest version that ever ran on the iPhone 3G was iOS 4.2.1, but even though iOS 4 brought multi-tasking to the platform the iPhone 3G never got that. The iPhone 3G had been introduced in June 2008 with 16 and 8 GB capacities. Of these the 16 GB was discontinued after 1 year while Apple kept the 8 GB model around as the cheaper iPhone. This was discontinued on June 4, 2010 when the iPhone 3GS took its place as the “cheap one” while the iPhone 4 became the “current model”.

Long story short: The iPhone 3G has been discontinued 2 years ago. But there is also a technical reason why 2012 will be the final nail in the coffin that buries the iPhone 3G: The deprecation of armv6.

Read more