Macminicolo [Sponsor]→

Our thanks to Macminicolo for sponsoring MacStories this week with their Mavericks promo.

The Mac mini gets better and better as a server and Macminicolo has been hosting them since they started this niche market in 2005. They host your Mac mini in a very high end data center where you can use it for all kinds of things. They’re known for their personal service and impeccable uptime.

To celebrate the release of Mavericks, they have a promotion running through the end of October. They’ll host your Mac mini for just $10/mo for nine months. More info here.

If you’ve been hosting a server from your office or home, here is a great chance to enjoy the benefits of a data center.

Federico’s note: I have been using two Mac minis at Macminicolo for the past year, for both personal (media server and automation) and work purposes (MacStories), and I couldn’t be happier. Great service and great support.

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Essence Icon Set for iOS 7→

When we first saw iOS 7 in June, we knew that we wanted to design an icon set for it. We took our time and we carefully crafted Essence, a set that includes 300 icons, ready for iOS 7.

Essence is exactly what you need to save time and get your app design ready for iOS 7. With a total of 300 unique designs, Essence offers high-quality, detailed, attribution-free icons that cover a wide range of categories from productivity and lifestyle to weather and food. Each of the 300 icons includes a filled “selected” version — so you can choose which icon is best for your app.

I helped my girlfriend Silvia launch this icon set for developers creating apps for iOS 7. Here’s the blog post about it.

The set is available here, and it’s on sale at $19.99 for a limited time.

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Unity Adds Support for iOS 7 Game Controllers→

From the Unity blog:

Like most mobile games developers, we’ve been closely following what important additions and changes the recently released iOS 7 update has made. One of the biggest and most exciting of Apple’s initiatives is the standardization of game controllers for iOS-based platforms. So we’re happy to tell you that, in addition to several important bug fixes for Xcode 5 / iOS 7 (Build&Run, WebCamTexture and status bar), Apple Controller support is included with 4.2.2! This blog post aims to answer most common questions this addition will raise and serve as a short tutorial on how to add support for iOS Game Controllers to your game.

With iOS 7 now approaching its first full month of public availability, game companies are starting to show their support for iOS 7’s new Game Controller APIs. Besides Unity, ClamCase announced their first official controller and leaked photos showed one from Logitech.

With an Apple media event reportedly scheduled for October 22, I have to wonder if further game controller announcements will be held back until that date. Apple likes to invite developers on stage, and third-party controllers for iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks would certainly make for an interesting demo, perhaps showing compatibility for both iOS devices (new iPads are rumored to be announced at the event) and Macs.

As I argued in June, there is great potential for game controllers and AirPlay, and I’m curious to see if and how Apple will start promoting this feature more aggressively.

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Scale Model of Apple’s New Spaceship Campus→

The concept of the building,” Oppenheimer said, “is collaboration and fluidity. It’ll provide a very open-spaced system, so that at one point in the day you may be in offices on one side of the circle and find yourself on the other side later that day.

Mercury News got an exclusive sneak peek at a scale model of Apple’s new “spaceship” campus, which goes before the Cupertino City Council Tuesday for an initial vote. The photos provide some context to Apple’s impressive proposal – not just for the spaceship-shaped building, but for the entire ecosystem that Apple plans to grow around it.

Check out the full gallery here, and a video of the model on YouTube.

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Status Magic Adds Support for iOS 7 Status Bars

Status Magic

Status Magic

I don’t like screenshots of iOS apps that show status bars cluttered with icons for carriers and Bluetooth, or, worse, red battery indicators. While it’s generally not the most important aspect of an app review, I do think that using screenshots of iPhone and iPad apps with clean status bars shows a level of care that extends beyond the written text. For app developers who only have a few slots for screenshots in iTunes, screenshots that don’t have poor cellular reception and rotation lock or Bluetooth icons are essential for a non-sloppy, professional, thoughtful presentation of their product. It’s a little thing, but I care about it.

Fortunately, other people care about this minor aspect of iOS apps as well. Created by Shiny Development, Status Magic is one of my must-have Mac apps because it solves the status bar problem with ease and a good feature set: once you have the screenshots you need to “clean up”, you can drop them into Status Magic, tweak some options, and export the cleaned up, more professional-looking screenshots with status bar that don’t have six icons in them. Read more

On Jony Ive’s and Marc Newson’s Collaboration for Bono’s Anti-HIV Campaign→

Paul Goldberger from Vanity Fair writes about the collaboration between Jony Ive and Marc Newson, who’ve put together an assortment of 40 items to auction off for Bono’s Product (Red) anti-HIV campaign.

Two one-of-a-kind pieces—a metal desk and a special Leica camera—were designed by Ive and Newson in collaboration, specially for the auction. Several others, like a customized Steinway grand piano and a Georg Jensen silver pitcher, are variations on existing objects that Ive and Newson both liked and got the manufacturers to agree to tweak for the sale, generally by adding something red. (The Steinway appears to be entirely white, but when you lift its lid, the underside turns out to be painted an intense, brilliant red, while the pitcher has a red enameled interior.) A few other items, such as a circa-1990 Russian cosmonaut’s space suit and a sketch for one of Elvis Presley’s stage costumes from 1970, are objects Ive and Newson found and decided that they liked well enough to include in the auction as is.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Marc Newson.

Unlike art, Newson said, “design is not inherently valuable. How would we generate revenue?” In the end, he said, “we decided just to put together things that we love.”

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Trucks and Cars→

David Sparks:

As the analogy goes, the desktop PCs are the trucks and the emerging classes of tablets and pocket computing devices, such as iPhones, are the cars. When he made the analogy, it made a lot of sense to me but I felt like it was still something pretty distant into the future. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Looking at my new iPhone, it has a 64 bit processor and is more powerful than anything I could’ve imagined just a few years ago. Moreover, software developers are getting smarter about ways to implement these touch devices in a way that’s quick, efficient, and just better than a traditional PC.

For geeks and professionals, there are still many tasks an iOS device isn’t good at. And yet, when you think about the fact that just three years ago stuff like this, this, or this didn’t exist, I do believe, like David, that Jobs was absolutely right in his prediction.

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Launch Center Pro 2.0 Review

Launch Center Pro, developed by Contrast (née App Cubby), can be considered the app that spearheaded a small revolution among iOS power users. Initially envisioned as a Notification Center tool, following an Apple rejection in late 2011 the app was released as Launch Center; in the summer of 2012, App Cubby completely reworked the inner workings and design of Launch Center and turned it into Launch Center Pro, allowing users to create custom actions with personalized URL schemes and therefore kicking off a series of months that saw the apperance of several other apps focused on actions, URL schemes, and automated workflows. In looking back at the past year of iOS automation, I think that Launch Center Pro 1.0 was a major turning point in that it proved that many iOS users wanted to create actions and workflows to save time and be more productive.

In March 2013, App Cubby released Launch Center Pro 1.1, which focused on TextExpander integration in URL schemes, Action Composer tweaks, and deeper system integration with clipboard actions for text and more. The app’s library of supported third-party apps kept growing as more developers took the opportunity to address the interest sparked by Launch Center Pro to add URL schemes to their apps. I remember, however, that back then App Cubby’s David Barnard – the same developer behind the recently released and successful weather app Perfect Weather – started telling me about his plans for the future of Launch Center Pro and expanding to other supported services, apps, and devices.

With today’s Launch Center Pro 2.0 for iPhone, a free update for existing customers, Contrast wants to ask: in the era of Drafts actions and Control Center, can Launch Center Pro still have a spot on a user’s Home screen, and possibly in the dock? Read more

Crunch Resource Extractor Updated with iOS 7 Support

In January 2012, I reviewed Crunch by Pragmatic Code, a Mac app to identify and extract icon and other resources from iOS apps:

Crunch is capable of automatically detecting apps from your iTunes library and filtering them by platform — iPhone, iPad, or Universal. Crunch will also install a QuickLook plugin, so you’ll be able to see each app’s icon overlaying the standard .ipa file preview in the Finder and QuickLook windows. Once you’ve selected an app, you can hit Export, and Crunch will ask you where you’d like to save an app’s resources, and if you’d like to keep all files with their existing folder hierarchy, or only Retina-ready @2x image files. The latter option can be particularly useful to pinpoint images ready for the rumored iPad 3′s Retina Display found inside several Apple apps for iOS.

Today, Pragmatic Code released version 1.5 of the app, which comes with support for iOS 7’s superellipse shape and a new Icon Composer tool to render icons from artwork.

Support for iOS 7’s new icon shape has been enabled in the app’s browser (where Crunch automatically recognizes apps from your iTunes library), Quick Look panel, and Icon Export menu. I don’t think that Apple has published official specifications for the new shape, but the one in Crunch looks just like the real thing to my untrained designer eye. When you hit Export in the top toolbar, you can still find and export assets from inside an app’s bundle, but if you click on Icon you’ll now see options to choose Superellipse (iOS 7), Rounded (iOS 6), or Automatic. Additionally, you can choose to export an icon’s artwork with no shape or no border by clicking on the Style dropdown menu.

The new Icon Composer can be used to drop artwork into Crunch and export it with Apple’s icon shapes. There is a preview panel on the left, and a slider to tweak the size of the icon.

While extracting application assets could be done with built-in tools on a Mac, Crunch is a great utility that simplifies the process and lets you save time. Support for iOS 7 is welcome and handy if you want to take a look at how other developers are managing resources inside their apps – or, with the Icon Composer, if you just want to preview how artwork will look under the new OS. Crunch is $9, and a 15-day free trial is available.