The new iOs 7 home screen icons are slightly more rounded than previous versions. You can see this easily if you have any icons with a rounded bezel on the icon. When you look at the MoneyWall2 app, you can see that the edges of the white bezel are cut off. A simple way to fix this is to remove the bezel or stroke, and you get something like MoneyWall, which fits in with the overall feel of iOs7 a little better.

The above image shows the difference between the two. You can download a template here: http://dribbble.com/shots/1127699-iOS-7-icon-shape-PSD?list=users

One of the great aspects of working on mobile apps is coming up with new UIs to handle lots of information on a tiny screen. Every now and again you have a break thru. And I think this is what we have achieved in our new currency convertor app. You will have to wait until it is approved by Apple until you can try it out, but it does make converting different currencies a whole lot easier.

Rather than sending around 3mb pictures, offer to automatically resize the image when attached to an email.

Our app is coming out real soon, and one of the things we have spend a lot of time working on is fixing the GPS locations. Since the Tram people like to make it hard, and have stopped releasing a file with all the locations of the stops, we had to compromise. To do this we used a revere GPS lookup function, that wasn’t too good at finding trams stops. So we have to go through and massage all the data. Yup, over 1,000 stops. Here is what it looks like when not fixed., rather than follow Flemington Rd road, the stops jump all over the place.

Whenever a new Xcode release and iOs version comes out, there is a lot of new adjustments to make. Apple make a lot of change that are a real pain at the start, but generally make sense after a while.

With Xcode 5, apple have added ARC (automatic reference counting) when you compile the application. This breaks a lot of the old way of doing things, such as release, autorelease, and using NSAutoreleasePool.

So if we have code such as this:

NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
…..
[pool release];

We will get an error. But all we need to do is change the format of the code to this:

@autoreleasepool {
….
}

Or you can switch of ARC by setting CLANG_ENABLE_OBJC_ARC to NO in the Build Settings of your app.

You can read more about ARC here https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/releasenotes/ObjectiveC/RN-TransitioningToARC/Introduction/Introduction.html

When importing old files, into your new iOs 7 project, you can go through and alter the file to remove all release, retain, autorelease to make it ARC compliant, or you can set ARC of on those particular files. The switch -fno-objc-arc disable ARC, and you administer it by going to Build Phases, clicking on each file, and add it as a flag, just as in the picture below.