Apple’s Results and Developers – David Smith

Yesterday Apple announced their financial results for the fiscal quarter running from October to December, 2012. The short version is that they shocked the world with record breaking revenue, profits and volume. That is all well and good for Apple, but I thought it would be interesting to boil down the numbers into the parts that actually affect individual developers.

Good editorial article from Fraser Speirs regarding Apple’s recently announced products and tools for education, and, most importantly, the iPad.

Apple’s announcements further iPad revolution in education | Macworld

The iPad has begun a quiet revolution in education. All over the world, schools are putting ambitious plans in place to adopt Apple’s tablet at large scale. When parents, teachers and administrators are surveyed, converting textbooks into electronic publications is often one of the main purposes that respondents imagine an iPad in school could be used for. It’s usually the parents and school administrators who are most enthusiastic about this—students and teachers often have more imagination!

This looks interesting and useful… I was considering developing something similar to create Flipboard-like effects, but this might just do the trick.

FlipTransform for iOS – Cocoa Controls

Animation component for the effect of flipping as in a news/clock ticker, or a page turn. Structured around the idea of a data object (i.e. headline in news, number in a clock, page in a book) as an animation frame, comprised of multiple CALayers.

Great article on the importance of design at this point in time, showing just how crucial a design focus is to succeed.

A List Apart: Articles: An Important Time for Design

Design is on a roll. Client services are experiencing a major uptick in demand, seasoned design professionals are abandoning client work in favor of entrepreneurship, and designer-co-founded startups such as Kickstarter and Airbnb are taking center stage. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that design has a massive role to play in the evolution of the web and the next generation of web products. This has not gone unnoticed in the startup world. Nearly every CEO and VC I’ve met in the last six months is on a wild hunt for designers. This demand is a powerful tool: it can be used to get more selective with clients, bring design to new markets, and get higher rates—or, it can be used to take aim at something bigger.

iBooks 2 hands-on: Apple’s reinvented textbook | The Verge

As for Life on Earth itself, it runs extremely well even on the original iPad we tested it on. Movies load quickly, page turns are smooth, and embedded animations work without a hitch. Images are particularly engaging, as most go full-screen with a tap, and also contain a number of other related images to swipe through as well. The download process was slightly painful, but that could be due to a large number of people hitting Apple’s servers all at once.

Apple – Press Info – Apple Unveils All-New iTunes U App for iPad, iPhone & iPod touch

NEW YORK—January 19, 2012—Apple® today announced an all-new iTunes® U app, giving educators and students everything they need on their iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch® to teach and take entire courses. The all-new iTunes U app lets teachers create and manage courses including essential components such as lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and syllabuses and offer them to millions of iOS users around the world. The iTunes U app gives iOS users access to the world’s largest catalog of free educational content from top universities including Cambridge, Duke, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, and starting today any K-12 school district can offer full courses through the iTunes U app. iTunes U has already become an incredibly popular learning tool for students with over 700 million downloads.

Apple – Press Info – Apple Reinvents Textbooks with iBooks 2 for iPad

NEW YORK—January 19, 2012—Apple® today announced iBooks® 2 for iPad®, featuring iBooks textbooks, an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging and truly interactive. iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, unrivaled navigation and much more. iBooks textbooks can be kept up to date, don’t weigh down a backpack and never have to be returned. Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore? with most priced at $14.99 or less, and with the new iBooks Author, a free authoring tool available today, anyone with a Mac® can create stunning iBooks textbooks.

Responsive Web Design: 50 Examples and Best Practices – DesignModo

Responsive web design term is related to the concept of developing a website design in a manner, that helps the lay out to get changed according to the user’s computer screen resolution. More precisely, the concept allows for an advanced 4 column layout 1292 pixels wide, on a 1025 pixel  width screen, that auto-simplifies into 2 columns. Also it suitably fixes on the smartphone and computer tablet screen. This particular designing technique we call “responsive web design”.

Totally agree with Gruber on this usability point.

Daring Fireball: On the Behavior of the iPhone Mute Switch

I think the current behavior of the iPhone mute switch is correct. You can’t design around every single edge case, and a new iPhone user who makes the reasonable but mistaken assumption that the mute switch silences everything, with an alarm set that he wasn’t aware of, and who is sitting in the front row of the New York Philharmonic when the accidental alarm goes off, is a pretty good example of an edge case.

Whereas if the mute switch silenced everything, there’d be thousands of people oversleeping every single day because they went to bed the night before unaware that the phone was still in silent mode.

Additionally, the suggestion made about showing more UIAlertViews just muddy the experience. We need LESS UIAlertViews… not more.