Why Apple doesn’t release things until they’re ready…
When iTunes Match finally went live, my iTunes Library was sent to the cloud for the last time and I was finally able to not worry about what music I had synced to my iPhone since I could grab anything I wanted to listen to on the fly. Yesterday, things didn’t go quite as well as usual and it frustrated me. It wasn’t Apple’s fault. I was in a less than ideal spot for 3G coverage at the time and that prevented the song I wanted to download quick enough to listen to without stopping. The problem cleared up as soon as I drove further down the road, but there were moments that I was actually angry at the phone and service.
I’m a patient person and very understanding, so my brief spout of anger surprised me a little bit. Thinking about it a little, it just reminded me about why Apple devices forgo features that aren’t at least 99% perfect. Apple’s hardware and software works so well together that the slightest hiccup causes hysteria amongst it’s users because we’re just not used to it. I’d say that’s a pretty awesome problem to have.
Secret Browser v1.7.0 Submitted!
UPDATE: Approved and ready to download!
After quite a long wait, I’ve finally deemed version 1.7.0 of Secret Browser to be ready for prime time! I’ve been spending a lot of time tweaking and testing to make sure everything works great and now it’s time for you all to have a go at it. What does 1.7.0 have in store for you?
- Custom User-Agents! A very popular request is finally here! I’ve included a bunch of pre-made User-Agent strings or you can put together your own! You can, now, start tricking websites into thinking you’re using a different web browser or a different device all together! (Ad-Free Mode exclusive)
- I’ve rewritten a TON of code so things work more smooth under the hood.
- Cleaned up Secret Browser’s Settings page. All Ad-Free Mode exclusive settings can be found on their own page too.
- An optional Forward button has been added to the smaller screened devices. This was another big request. Flip the switch on in your device’s Settings.app.
- I’ve (probably poorly, I apologize) translated what few words there are in Secret Browser to 6 new languages. Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German.
- I’ve squished a LOT of little naggy bugs.
- Rewrote the entire front page! I know it was ugly. I’m sorry it took so long. But the new front page is already live so you don’t have to deal with it anymore.
Hopefully it doesn’t take an eternity for Apple to approve. Keep a look out! It should be available very soon!
Adding internationalization to XIB files in Xcode 4
I want to post a quick Derrr post about localizing XIB files in Xcode 4 since I just spent a good 2 or 3 hours trying to figure out what I was doing wrong to find I wasn’t really doing anything wrong.
Localization of your Interface Builder files in Xcode 4 is a piece of cake, actually.
iOS consolidated.db “flaw”?
I’m kind of getting sick of the big hoopla about the recently discovered (even though it wasn’t recently discovered at all) consolidated.db file which sits quietly in a publicly available iOS directory and is backed up every time you sync your phone. The file in question keeps a running log of dates, times and locations according to your GPS and wifi radios. I am all for getting up in arms if Apple has been actually collecting and doing something with this data without anyone knowing about it but the fact of the matter is, they aren’t. What really sucks, is that I have a feeling that this “bug” will get plugged with a future version of iOS and I personally think it’s a neat feature! I just pulled up a map of the last 6 months of my life and thought it was pretty damned cool. I agree that there should definitely be some sort of opt-out system that would purge this cache every so often, but I don’t want to have to do that. I’ll worry about my own security and make sure my iPhone and it’s backups stay out of the hands of wrong doers (heaven for big they see the extremely vague representation of locations data that I just saw on the map I made).
Bottom line. This is probably some oversight bug where a line of code wasn’t written to purge old location data. That’s perfectly plausible. But the data is so vague that it doesn’t really matter much. And without access to your computer or phone, no one can get at this information anyways. So plug the hole, Apple, but how about an opt-out strategy? I like it.
Going back to unjailbroken
I really do love all the nifty features and tweaks that jailbreaking allows. I’ve dabbled many times. But every time I do, it just eventually reminds me how amazing Apple’s attention to detail and their refusal to release features until they “just work” really is. There aren’t any jailbroken features that I have found that work 100% of the time and/or work as intuitively and without fail as if Apple would have implemented them. At the end of the day, stability and intuition are more important than themes or “quick reply” to SMS.
I’m not going to go back to my pre-jailbreak backup either because I’m going to see how well iPhone Explorer works with restoring my Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies (among others) save files.
Can’t wait to see what iOS 5 has in store for us this summer! I’m probably going to write a post about what I’d love to see eventually.
Prompt for iOS. Get it!
Anyone who needs to SSH to a remote server on any sort of frequent basis should really download Panic’s new app, Prompt. It’s $5, but well worth it because it just works. For those with jailbroken phones, you can even ssh to your own phone instead of using MobileTerminal! DO IT!
Why not use Mobile Safari to it’s fullest?
I don’t understand why more web developers aren’t using a lot of the great features in Mobile Safari when they’re re-formatting their sites for iPhone-type devices. AdMob is a great example of how to do it. If your a developer that uses AdMob for serving up your ads, you probably have seen their mobile formatted site (m.admob.com). There’s an attention to detail involved that (for some strange reason) doesn’t exist elsewhere. Granted, a lot of this polish comes from some smooth transitions, but I feel like they make the site feel more like a native app and less like just another website. Bank of America is a good example of what not to do as far as I’m concerned. They have a native app and a web app. The problem is, the native app is just a crappy wrapper for the web app. They also haven’t taken the time to optimize anything. A huge company like Bank of America should have the funds available to at least come CLOSE to the smoothness of AdMob. Bank of America’s site just feels cheap and thrown together. I don’t really have a point here. I just thought about this when I logged in to AdMob’s mobile site the other day and was reminded how much they nailed the basics of what can be done with Mobile Safari and how little I’ve seen of it elsewhere.
Baby-Daddy Generator Preview added to iPregnancyTest
An update to iPregnancyTest was just approved by apple that includes a couple of tweaks here and there. There’s a one time notice about iPregnancyTest’s support for Facebook that reminds you to log in so we can use your Facebook friends as a basis for the Baby-Daddy Generator. Speaking of the Baby-Daddy Generator, there’s also a new “Baby-Daddy Generator Preview” feature that allows you to see who our “super scientific tests” have determined to be the Baby-Daddy before launching Mail or asking for your permission to post a feed story to Facebook. Update your apps now or, if your don’t already own iPregnancyTest, pick it up from the App Store now.
Secret Browser is now available!
Until today, the only options you had for private web browsing were either kind of shotty and thrown together really quick or much more expensive than anyone should pay for such a thing. Secret Browser was approved and released on the App Store today to solve those problems! I made sure to try and squash all the annoyances of other private browsers out there now as well as threw a very reasonable price tag on it. How does FREE sound? Head over to the App Store now and download Secret Browser. Let me know what you think!
P.S. You can also go ahead and follow @secretbrowser on twitter or just follow my twitter list for all of my apps!
Poke A Keith now OFFICIALLY available!
Poke A Keith was released about 2 months ago but was very quickly removed from sale (by myself) after a tiny oversight was found by me that would have caused some major problems in the future. It was a very quick fix. Took me about 2 minutes to fix it and I was ready to submit the update. While waiting for this update to be approved, I worked on some more features and bug fixes until I figured I’d just submit this new update instead. I did this about 2 more times after this too. Today marks the RE-release of Poke A Keith for good! The best part about the re-release is that it’s FREE! Lots has been added since I originally released and I’m quite happy with this as an initial version. I’ll be adding more in the near future. Go download Poke A Keith from the App Store now for your iPhone or iPod Touch!
- Dead Simple to learn. Very, very hard to master!
- Great score sheets give you a LOT of ways to compete with your friends!
- Share your scores (Or maybe you’d like the word, brag?) with your friends on Facebook or via email.
- “Achievement” scores are there for you to discover.
- Tons of AWESOMENESS is always included!
iPregnancyTest v1.2.0 released!
Apple was finally kind enough to approve iPregnancyTest v1.2.0 and it’s now live on the App Store. There was a tiny discrepancy with a new button image I used that Apple didn’t think should be used in the way I did, but all is well now and you can go ahead and update/download it now! What’s new?
- Facebook Support! All my apps are getting the Facebook treatment. The result sharing now offers the ability to share via Facebook instead of just email. We’ll also use your Facebook friends with the Baby-Daddy Generator and the new Baby-Daddy Picker.
- Baby-Daddy Picker! Before, you would need to type in a friend’s name if you didn’t want to use the Baby-Daddy Generator, but now we supply a list for your to pick from. If your logged in to Facebook, it’ll show you all your Facebook friend’s names. If your not, you’ll see names from your Address Book. You can still type a name if you want, but the option is there for you now!
- Misc. Bug Fixes.
it’s a good update! So download and start sharing on Facebook now!
Pros & Cons on AppGiveaway.com
Pros & Cons is available on AppGiveaway.com now! You can sign up there and possibly win yourself a free code for Pros & Cons!
Forum Status
Since I don’t intend on stopping the release of iPhone apps (or other apps for other platforms I become interested in), I’m going to need a nice place where users of said apps can go for support and to just chat with other like minded individuals. So naturally, I need a forum here. It will focus primarily on supporting my iPhone apps. It will give me and other users a centralized place to go to find answers to questions and to really get in contact with me for feature suggestions or bug reports or what have you. A quick status on this is that it’s coming along quite well. I found a decent bit of forum software and have started work on skinning it to blend in with the rest of dnite.org.. Just calling it a night and figured I’d go ahead and report what I’ve been working on. Look out for the dnite.org forums coming very soon!
iPregnancyTest v1.1 FINALLY approved!
The update to iPregnancyTest (v1.1) has finally been approved!
- “Result Sharing” was added to let you share positive results with your friends while using out optional “Baby-Daddy Generator”
- “Baby-Daddy Generator” was added to automatically pick the name of the Baby-Daddy if you aren’t quite sure who it might be.
- “Coin-Flip Mode” turns iPregnancyTest into the best coin-flip app on the iPhone!
Download it now from iTunes @ http://bit.ly/ipregnancytest
