Category: iOS
Sun & Moon 2.0 is a major refresh focused on modernizing the app and making conditions easier to read at a glance. Nearly every part of the experience has been revisited, from the daily dashboard and widgets to the artwork, location management, and support for unusual astronomical events around the world. NEW A Cleaner Dashboard The Today view puts the…
On September 1, 2016 Apple sent out an email to developers with some upcoming App Store policy changes. One of these was labeled Quality Apps and seemed to be aimed both at apps that would no longer pass the review process and apps that have been long abandoned. Quality Apps Quality is extremely important to us. We know that many…
Sun & Moon 1.0.3 is a small update, which is focused on fixing a few edge cases that could lead to UI weirdness and also the removal of iAd and the in-app purchase to disable ads since it has been discontinued. The revenue gained from the ad banners and the in-app purchase ($64 since release) is not enough to warrant…
Background All iOS devices have a unique device identifier (UDID) that is needed to sign and deploy apps outside of the App Store. Traditionally this requires that the user plug the device into a computer, launch iTunes, and click through the serial number field until the UDID shows up. Fortunately, we can use a portion of the enterprise management support…
The App Store’s Top Free, Paid, and Grossing charts are probably the most effective aspect of the App Store – too effective. Top charts are common to all forms of media, from The New York Times’ bestsellers list of books to Billboard’s top ten lists for music. The popularity of top charts is simple: people want to know what other…
On average, games accounted for approximately $25 of the $35 spent across the 110 million iPhones active in the U.S. during 2015. Second-place Music accounted for $3.40, or less than one sixth of Games. I’d love to see the numbers from previous years to see if there’s a trend.
Portfolio 4.5.0 is a big update but hopefully one that will mostly go unnoticed. It doesn’t bring any new, shiny features — rather, it enhances, refines, and fixes existing ones. The sync engine was the primary target with this update. It was written in a day when dealing with asynchronous code paths in iOS meant using NSLock and subclasses. Rewriting…
Introduced in iOS 8, UITraitCollection added the concept of size classes to the iOS autolayout system. As we found out a year later in iOS 9, the primary purpose of these was to allow for adapting the interface layout for multitasking. The default size classes look like this: Unfortunately, this isn’t very useful if you’re looking to tailor the UI…
iOS Revenue. I brought this up last year and we still haven’t licked it. We had a change of heart — well, an experimental change of heart — and reduced the price of our iOS apps in 2015 to normalize them at $9.99 or less, thinking that was the upper limit and/or sweet spot for iOS app pricing. But it…
Sync is one of the notoriously hard problems in computing. There are all kinds of edge cases that have to be accounted for lest they throw the data into an ambiguous state. It comes in multiple flavors and with a variety of needs, but all of them eventually boil down to one goal: ensuring the local copy of the data…
Portfolio 4.1.4 is a relatively small update, focusing primarily on fixing a few elusive bugs related to the gallery list in the content manager. It also brings an iPad Pro-sized icon now that Xcode finally supports setting one (why that was not possible to do prior to the iPad Pro’s release I have no idea). Release Notes Fixes The gallery…
As I write this, I have just pressed the submit button on my first app written in Swift: Sun & Moon. I covered it briefly before, but in short, it’s an app for checking the rise and set times of the sun and moon either locally or at a city somewhere on the planet. It was a project both to…