Archive for September, 2013

M7 Data

Saturday, September 28th, 2013

I installed the Argus activity tracking app yesterday, and was surprised to discover that it was showing me my footstep data from the day I purchased my iPhone 5S. The iPhone 5S has the M7 motion co-processor, which can track activity in the background.  The way I expected this to work is that an application […]

Downloadable Fonts in iOS 7

Saturday, September 28th, 2013

iOS 7 has significantly expanded the number of downloadable fonts available for iOS apps. iOS 6 supported downloadable fonts. This is hinted at in Apple’s Tech Note HT5484, which says “Apps can also install the following fonts as necessary”. The fonts available to install mostly provided support for non-English text. With iOS 7, they’ve expanded […]

Core Data is pretty fast

Friday, September 13th, 2013

There’s an article in the excellent online magazine objc.io by Brent Simmons on the topic of using SQLite instead of Core Data.  An example I’ve heard cited before is Brent’s example that he uses in this article of “what if you need to mark 10,000 items as read?”. This is a compelling example because with […]

Is Touch ID Innovation?

Thursday, September 12th, 2013

Some folks are complaining that there wasn’t enough “innovation” in Apple’s iPhone 5s and 5c announcements.  But I think the 5s represents the kind of innovation Apple does best.  I’m talking about the fingerprint scanning. A few years ago, backups were a pain in the butt.  Apple did something amazing with Time Machine in that […]