The 2016 Panic Report →

April 5, 2017 · 10:28

Cabel Sasser:

iOS continues to haunt us. If you remember, 2016 was the year we killed Status Board, our very nice data visualization app. Now, a lot of it was our fault. But it was another blow to our heavy investment in pro-level iOS apps a couple years ago, a decision we’re still feeling the ramifications of today as we revert back to a deep focus on macOS. Trying to do macOS quality work on iOS cost us a lot of time for sadly not much payoff. We love iOS, we love our iPhones, and we love our iPads. But we remain convinced that it’s not — yet? — possible to make a living selling pro software on those platforms. Which is a real bummer!

This is what worries me most about the state of iOS. While Apple’s motives to bring the price of software down seemed like a good idea at the time — developers would make up their profits by the sheer volume of the platform — it appears that app sales are slowing, especially in the more demanding part of the market. Most people already have everything that they need and are not spending as much money on new software as in the early days. While I continue to be able to do about 90% of my work on an iPad, most don’t even try. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed for iOS, hoping that it will start evolving at a faster pace, making it easier to work productively on it. Also, I’m still waiting for a full Adobe Lightroom experience on iPad, with the ability to transfer catalogs between platforms, not using Adobe’s cloud.


Counter-Forensics: Pair-Lock Your Device with Apple’s Configurator →

February 10, 2017 · 11:39

Jonathan Zdziarski:

(…) This article is a brief how-to on using Apple’s Configurator utility to lock your device down so that no other devices can pair with it, even if you leave your device unlocked, or are compelled into unlocking it yourself with a passcode or a fingerprint. By pair-locking your device, you’re effectively disabling every logical forensics tool on the market by preventing it from talking to your iOS device, at least without first being able to undo this lock with pairing records from your desktop machine. This is a great technique for protecting your device from nosy coworkers, or cops in some states that have started grabbing your call history at traffic stops.


iOS 10, watchOS 3 and tvOS 10 Is Out

September 13, 2016 · 19:19

Apple released iOS 10, watchOS 3 and tvOS 10 about 20 minutes ago or so. The build is the same as the dev and public GM so if you’re on either of those, you do not need to (or can) update.

Please remember to do a full iTunes backup before updating though — add a password so that you also backup your Health data, as well as your passwords and remembered Wi-Fi networks.


iOS 10 Beta Released With Unencrypted Kernel →

June 22, 2016 · 08:32

Tom Simonite:

Why Apple has suddenly opened up its code is unclear. One hypothesis in the security community is that, as Levin puts it, someone inside the company “screwed up royally.” But he and Solnik both say there are reasons to think it may have been intentional. Encouraging more people to pore over the code could result in more bugs being disclosed to Apple so that it can fix them.

Jonathan Zdziarski, another iOS security expert, favors that hypothesis, because accidentally forgetting to encrypt the kernel would be such an elementary mistake. “This would have been an incredibly glaring oversight, like forgetting to put doors on an elevator,” he says.


How Colour Managment Works on iOS 9.3 →

April 22, 2016 · 12:59

Brandon Chester:

With 9.3 iOS essentially has full support for ColorSync in the same way that OS X does. ColorSync has been Apple’s system for color management for many years now, and it works very well in applications that are built on top of Apple’s frameworks like Quartz, Core Animation, and the entirety of AppKit. It just so happens that basically every iOS application is built on these frameworks, and so the task of building system-wide color management in to iOS was seemingly not a difficult one.

Color management appears to be working quite fine across the entire system and within all apps. The interesting thing is, the sign that color management works is the fact that for almost all content there is absolutely no difference between the new iPad Pro and the iPad Air 2. This is expected, as almost all content on the device will target the sRGB gamut, and so if color management is working it should be mapped into the larger DCI-P3 gamut without issue.

Apple’s own applications interpret untagged content as sRGB, and also properly understand tagged images and videos and display them correctly. Safari also renders CSS colors correctly, which is something that can’t be said for any other browser that I’m aware of. The same is true of all third party apps that I’ve tried, including Dropbox, Google Drive, AVPlayerHD, Animuplyr, among many others. While I had worried that iOS’s lack of color management prior to 9.3 would lead to many problems with accurate images on the 9.7″ iPad Pro, Apple has handled the situation better than I ever expected.

The problem with colour management and gamuts is that many computers, tablets, and smartphones can barely display sRGB properly, which means that putting out images which will fit in DCI-P3 is pointless – 99.9% of the people viewing them will not see the correct image. Unless you’re just using the 9.7″ iPad Pro to display photos to family, clients, etc. This could be solved in a number of ways, but none of them are easy at this point in time, nor do I see them being implemented in the near future. We still have a long way to go unfortunately.

Brandon also details how True Tone works and how it affects colour accuracy — I have Night Shift turned off and I would turn True Tone off too (if my 12.9″ iPad Pro had it), perhaps apart from reading sessions.


Amirali Rajan Goes Into Detail How His iOS Game Went Viral →

April 19, 2016 · 21:32

Amirali Rajan’s TL;DR summary:

Made a little over $700k selling a premium mobile game with no IAP or Ads as a one man shop. It is possible to create sustainable income from apps (albeit very difficult). Made a little over $700k selling a premium mobile game with no IAP or Ads as a one man shop. It is possible to create sustainable income from apps (albeit very difficult).

A few things from his story surprised me, including the fact that Amirali doesn’t know why his game went viral.


Live Video Viewing Up 86% Over Last Year in MLB’s at Bat App, Thanks to Multitasking →

April 18, 2016 · 08:29

Sarah Perez:

To support these claims, the MLB gathered usage metrics from the first two weeks of the season — to clarify for non-baseball fans, the MLB season is not quite two weeks old at this point (Opening Day was April 3rd).

During these first two weeks, MLB fans spent 20 percent more minutes per day, on average, watching live video on iPad compared with the 2015 season, when multitasking was not available. (MLB says that any form of multitasking behavior was counted here, not just spilt-screen viewing.)

The only video I watch on my iPad is on YouTube, which doesn’t support any of these features. Their whole site and app completely sucks on mobile — I actually deleted the app it was so bad. Perhaps someone will get off their behind and finally do something about it.


Why Does iPad Not Have a Native Calculator? →

April 12, 2016 · 12:41

User tangoshukudai on Reddit:

It is actually a funny story. When they were prototyping the iPad, they ported the iOS calc over, but it was just stretched to fit the screen. It was there all the way from the beginning of the prototypes and was just assumed by everyone at apple that it was going to be shipped that way. A month before the release, Steve Jobs calls Scott Forstall into his office and says to him, “where is the new design for the calculator? This looks awful” He said, “what new design?” This is what we are shipping with. Steve said, “no, pull it we can’t ship that”. Scott fought for it to stay in, but he knew he had to get their UI team involved to design a new look for the calculator but there was no way they could do it in that short time frame, so they just scrapped it. It has been such low priority since then that no one cares to work on it since there is more important things to work on. (Source: I worked at Apple)

They should have just licensed PCalc [App Store].


Users Will Soon Be Able to Remove Apple’s Stock iOS Apps →

April 6, 2016 · 21:29

Bryan M. Wolfe:

Apple has added two new keys labeled “isFirstParty” and  “isFirstPartyHideableApp” in iTunes metadata. These two new values started showing up a few weeks ago on every app in the App Store. The iTunes metadata is where all the information about an app is stored. It shows things like the date it was released, the App Store category it’s in, its size, etc. The new keys suggest the ability to remove apps such as Stocks, Compass, and Voice Messages is coming very soon.


Using iOS 9’s Universal Links (And My YouTube Rant) →

March 30, 2016 · 12:14

Ben Collier:

If you don’t know, Universal Links allow a website and iOS app to be linked together so following a link opens up the app (with the right content) instead of the website. For example, following a link to a Vine video can open up straight in the Vine app; where the video looping experience is much better than the website.

Universal Links are great and I love them, but there is one app that totally screws this up — YouTube. Perhaps this changed recently, but up to about a month ago, I had to use the YouTube app after clicking any YouTube link to watch a video (embeds were exempt from this) — this completely broke down when using Tweetbot or Twitter, breaking my flow and forcing me to jump between apps. I finally uninstalled the app.

This caused one more huge problem. The YouTube app does not offer every setting and option that their website does, especially in terms of managing my own videos. Normally I would just open the desktop site in Safari, but because of Universal Links, it would switch me over to the app every single time that I tried to do so. Unacceptable.

 


Ben Collier’s Recipe to Fix the Safari/Mail Link Bug →

March 29, 2016 · 18:12

Ben Collier came up with a new ‘recipe’ to fix the iOS 9.x link bug plaguing iOS users:

If you’ve been hit by the iOS 9.3 broken links you can follow these steps to fix the issue whilst we wait for a full update from Apple. Unfortunately you’ll need to hook your iPhone or iPad up to your computer and sync with iTunes.

You may need to try this a few times for it to work, it seems like a specific timing needs to occur for the correct caches to clear.

If you tried mine, and it didn’t work, make sure to give his a run.


How to fix iOS 9.x Safari/Mail Link Bug [updated]

March 29, 2016 · 10:05

Apple published iOS 9.3.1, which should fix all of the issues.

There have been numerous threads and articles about the iOS link bug, with many of them posting false information. This bug is not limited to iOS 9.3 nor does it have much to do with the update itself. It appears to be caused by the Shared Web Content Daemon, which goes into a crash loop after the Booking.com app tried to register too many universal links. Perhaps other apps are to blame too. I won’t bore you with all the details and get to the point: the method I wrote up below fixed the issue on my iPhone 6S Plus.

Continue reading →


ColorSync Is Supported on iOS 9.3 →

March 24, 2016 · 22:28

Craig Hockenberry on Open Radar:

Additionally, starting with iOS 9.3 ColorSync support was added to UIKit.

I’ve noticed that it works correctly for both UIColor in a UILabel and with a UIImage in a UIImageView. Are there any other places where ICC profiles are used?

In a conversation with Apple engineers, I also learned that some older devices do not match color. That’s fine, but devices should be listed so our apps can adapt gracefully to this situation.

iOS is catching up, but it needs to speed things up considerably. Some basic OS X features are still missing. And while external keyboard support for my iPad Pro has improved, it’s not yet on par with Apple’s desktop OS.