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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…

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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.

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Best Road Trip Ever

On the Sunday before WWDC 2013 was spent in good company, on a road trip to Cupertino. But before we took that, we got ourselves registered. Apple successfully pioneered a new system to streamline the registration process.

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DIY Apple Pilgrimage Prep

This year’s Pilgrimage to the Apple Headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino is of the DIY variety. In past years Apple would have updated the Company Store website with information about extra opening times for WWDC tourists, but this year they didn’t.

Traditionally there were several busses organized by Scott Knaster. I don’t know if his reason for not doing it this year was lack of a WWDC ticket or lack of confirmed opening times. Either way his professionally organized tour did not come to pass this year.

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DTRichTextEditor 1.5.1

This maintenance release for DTRichTextEditor fixes several crucial bugs. It is the last release before WWDC 2013.

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DTCoreText 1.5.3

Last update before WWDC. This is a maintenance release fixing some pressing issues, some of which were causing crashing.

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Apple-tab-span

An editor has to deal with the user hitting the tab key on an external keyboard and then be able to persist these tabs. Thus the question arose how I would best represent tab characters (\t) in HTML. At first I tried to encode them as 	 entities, but that is causing lots of trouble since on the parsing end it is difficult to know whether a tab came from this entity or if it came from the literal \t.

I could have done that with a very ugly hack of libxml2 (which powers my DTHTMLParser), but after having wasted half a day on this I relented. I previously reported my findings about Apple-converted-space which is the method NSHTMLWriter uses to preserve multiple spaces.

In this article I am documenting my findings related to how Apple conserves tabs for HTML output.

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Reading Into The WWDC App

7 days (and change) before the WWDC 2013 Keynote presentation Apple released the official app to accompany the conference. Due to the (sudden, unexpected, surprising) sell-out of the conference Apple decided on several changes.

For starters the WWDC app allows all registered developers to log in and provides benefits even for developers who did not score a golden ticket. In previous years – if I remember correctly – the app would only let you see its contents if you had an activated WWDC to your name.

WWDC 2013 is even more highly anticipated than any previous Apple event due to the widespread notion that Apple is doomed if they don’t announce many big and impressive new things. For lack of anything better to pick apart, let’s do a bit of tea-leaf-reading on the WWDC 2013 app.

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DTFoundation 1.4.2

The update was necessary because I had forgotten to add DTSidePanelController to any static library. Without that you could only compile it directly into your app, instead of being able to link in the lib and use it from there.

When I added it to the iOS Static Library and Static Framework targets I found out that I had already coded the delegate to use weak references. The general deployment target (minimum OS version) is still iOS 4.3 which did not support zeroing weak references.

So I also added zeroing weak references support in DTFoundation, via DTWeakSupport.h.

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WWDC iWatch with Pebble

There will most likely not be an iWatch this year, the Pebble is what comes closest to it. It does have an internal ARM-based CPU and it can communicate with iOS devices over bluetooth. There are two kinds of of things you can build for it: watch faces (which don’t have any interaction) and apps.

For today’s project I want to try to put together a watch face that shows the WWDC 2013 Logo and a countdown to the keynote on Monday, June 10th.

Update June 2nd: I made the UTC offset changeable and released a build of the app via mypebblefaces.com

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