A tweet this morning by James Duncan Davidson got me thinking about the future of Retina images on the web. Before I start talking about the future, let’s take a quick look at the past. There was a time, not too long ago, where many of us were trapped behind 56kbps modems with 256 color [...]
I’ve always loved shows that take you behind the scenes of creative efforts: Project Runway and Classic Albums being two of my favorites. Here’s one about the development of Twitterrific 5. Since a lot of the people reading this aren’t developers, I’m going to keep the jargon to a minimum. You’ll be able to enjoy [...]
If you’re like me, the iPad has changed how you look at computers in just a matter of weeks. The possibilities for this device seem endless. It’s natural at this point to start thinking about the future, and to do that thinking in terms of the past. As an example, we’ve been getting plenty of feature [...]
Dear Steve, First, let me congratulate you and everyone at Apple on the release of the iPad. From my dealings with your company, I know it wasn’t easy. Thanks to everyone for busting their asses: a lot of very complex puzzle pieces came together during those last 60 days! I recently had an encounter with [...]
Another area where I find iPhone development to be a bit convoluted was with toolbars and action sheets. The sheets are conceptually tied to the toolbar, yet there is no glue to combine UIActionSheet with UIToolbar. It’s also fairly difficult to represent your application state in the toolbar—an example is the refresh button in Twitterrific [...]
Every once in awhile you read a blog post that completely changes the way you think about a problem. Matt Gallagher’s Cocoa With Love is one of those blogs where it happens often. If you’re not subscribing to his RSS feed, do it now. In particular, this post addressed a problem that every iPhone developer [...]
Dear Steve, As an iPhone developer who’s been in the App Store since its launch, I’m starting to see a trend that concerns me: developers are lowering prices to the lowest possible level in order to get favorable placement in iTunes. This proliferation of 99¢ “ringtone apps” is affecting our product development. Unlike a lot [...]
A friend of mine recently commented that native Twitter applications are the new flashlights. It’s true, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise: consider the number of web apps that proliferated before the advent of the native SDK. Personally, I welcome this competition. Seeing the work of other developers whose work I respect and admire [...]
Twitterrific has a splash screen and I would like to get rid of it. But I can’t. Splash screens hurt the user experience from a purely psychological point-of-view. They don’t change the launch time of your iPhone application at all, but it looks and feels longer. But there’s a problem: you can only specify one [...]
Thank God—that’s the last time I’m going to type that word for awhile. The meme is dead, long live the SDK. As a way to celebrate the lifting of the NDA, we bring you some very special source code. To wile away the time between our product submission and the launch of the App Store, [...]