iOS Device Summary
I created this summary chart as a way to visualize a few key iOS device properties. This has helped me decide which mix of devices I use to get reasonable coverage for development and testing.
Archive for October 9, 2012
JPEG Compression and Retina Images
So a smaller filesize AND a better quality on both screen types! […] The bottomline is that heavy compression doesn’t affect the final image as much as you would expect. This is because of the greater amount of pixels in the Retina image, compression artifacts are scaled down and therefore almost unnoticeable.
Via Hacker News, which questions the results. However, regardless of the precise file sizes, I imagine that the conclusion of JPEG compression beating upscaling will hold. There’s also a follow-up article (translated).
ClassicMap 1.0
Katsumi Kishikawa’s ClassicMap is a free (and open-source) app that brings Google Maps to iOS 6 (via Vincent Pickering). It doesn’t support directions, but it’s in some ways better than using Apple’s Maps app or Google Maps in Mobile Safari.
Mac App Store Review Times
A developer training firm named Shiny Development has been tracking waiting times for the App Store review process as closely as it can, and it has bad news for would-be app developers: The waiting times for the Mac App Store are growing longer. In the last six months or so, the waiting time for getting a Mac App published has gone from under seven days to almost as high as a month, according to Shiny’s data. Apple’s process is largely closed off—there is a little bit of information for developers on the main dev Web site, but otherwise Shiny has mostly gathered this information from the various developers it tracks and corresponds with online.
It’s no wonder that Apple doesn’t report the average review time for Mac apps the way it does for iOS ones. And it’s scary as a developer to think that you could ship a bug (or have Apple ship an OS update that introduces one). You work as quickly as possible to get a fix ready, and then Apple sits on it for a month—or longer if you’re unlucky enough to have one of the above-average review times. Even after waiting, there’s no guarantee that your update will be approved. Recently, Apple has rejected apps for not conforming to new, unwritten requirements, e.g. relating to 1024×1024 icons that no user will really see.
