Posts in mac

Some App Updates Resulting In Instant Crashes Due To Presumed Apple CDN Issue

In the last 24 hours or so, a number of apps that have been updated by users have crashed on launch due to a problem presumed to be connected to the App Store’s content distribution network (CDN). A number of popular apps from Instapaper, Readdle Scanner Pro, Angry Birds Space HD Free and CommBank Kaching amongst others have been just some of the affected apps. The issue, not affecting every customer, occurs when a user updates their apps and goes to launch them but instead the app crashes before it can load.

Instapaper was one of the first to be affected by the issue with an update that went live late on July 3rd. Developer Marco Arment was instantly “deluged” by support requests complaining of instant crashes with the latest version. After a bit of digging and looking at his support requests, Marco believes it comes about due to a corrupt version of the updated app being distributed by the App Store CDN in some regions. For Instapaper the issue was resolved (a non-corrupt version propagated to all regions) within two hours but it isn’t known if it was due to Marco’s emails to the App Review team or just an issue resolved with time.

If you’re a developer, and you have a non-critical update pending release, I suggest waiting a few days for this to presumably get sorted out before releasing it. [Marco Arment]

Apple has yet to make any statement on the issue and Marco and the other developers affected by the issue have yet to receive responces from any of the developer relations groups at Apple either. You can view a tentative list of apps affected by the issue over at The Next Web and at Marco’s personal blog which also goes into detail about the issue.

It may be wise to hold off from updating any apps for the time being as well, with the issue affecting people across all regions and all different apps. If you’ve already been affected by the issue, the only real way to fix it is to delete the app and try re-installing the app - but this will only work if the app is no longer corrupted on Apple’s side.

[Sources: Marco.org and The Next Web]

Grab Key Codes Directly From Your Dashboard With “KeyCodes”

Designer Tobas Ahlin (@tobiasahlin), working as a UI designer at Spotify, is known for his simple and useful OS X dashboard widgets for web developers. His widgets Loremify and Minicodes (both available for free) are well-known within the community. Loremify automatically generates “Lorem Ipsum…” placeholder text, with the option to specify the amount of characters and paragraphs — perfect for testing various text layouts on websites. And if you coded large CSS or JavaScript files, you can use Minicodes to “minify” them into smaller file sizes using the YUI compressing algorithm for faster upload and transfer. Both widgets feature minimalist, very polished UIs. And today, they are joined by a third one: KeyCodes.

When you develop a web application, you sometimes want to bind functions to single or multiple keys (for example to quickly toggle actions). For that purpose, you need their so-called key code (a specific number each key has) to make sure you adress the right one. KeyCodes makes it easy to get this code. Just open your dashboard, click on KeyCodes, and press the key whose code you need, and both the key and its key code number are instantly displayed using a neon-styled, stainless steel UI (similar to Loremify’s look; see header image).

Simple, fast, intuitive, and free of charge. Go ahead and download KeyCodes for free from Ahlin’s website.

Ars Technica Investigates The Future Of Thunderbolt Cables→

Ars Technica Investigates The Future Of Thunderbolt Cables

In an investigation for Ars Technica, Chris Foresman explores why Thunderbolt cables, more than a year after Thunderbolt debuted, remain at the expensive $50 and greater price range. Foresman dug into what the current situation was and discovered that apart from Apple, there is currently only one volume supplier of Thunderbolt cables that are likely rebranded by Belkin, Elgato, Kanex and others that offer Thunderbolt cables.

While other vendors are now offering their own Thunderbolt cables, prices have mostly stayed the same—in fact, some have gone up. We found this surprising; typically more vendors offering competing products leads to lower prices. And as the high cable price represents a fairly high barrier to entry for Thunderbolt devices, it relegates the standard to niche, early-adopter territory.

Foresman found that prices won’t really drop until early 2013 when a second generation design by Intersil will enter production. The current “first-gen cables” are based on a Genum transciever from Semtech that is built with silicon germanium which makes it much more expensive to produce.

It’s likely that Intel and Apple chose the Semtech part because it was either an already existing part that fit the requirements for Thunderbolt’s high 10Gbps bi-directional data rate, or Semtech had something similar that was easily adaptable.

The new design from Intersil does things differently by combining the cable’s microcontroller and transciever into a single processing chip and the power management and voltage regulators into another single chip - meaning the number of integrated circuits in the cable will go from 4 to 2. Intersil’s John Mitchell says to Ars that their solution is “half the chips, half the size, uses half the power, and cheaper conductors can be used. By the end of the year, cables will be less expensive.”

The chips are manufactured on a lower cost, 40nm CMOS process, improving yields and lowering costs significantly. The 40nm process also dissipates less heat, reducing the need for bulky heat sinking within the cable plug.

Permalink

#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday

Independence Day in the USA is tomorrow (July 4th) and there are many great deals rolling in! Here are today’s @MacStoriesDeals on hardware, iOS, and Mac apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get them before they end!
Read more

Image Compression Case Study: ImageOptim vs. Xcode→

Image Compression Case Study: ImageOptim vs. Xcode

When iOS developers package their apps, images can be compressed to a “CgBi” format through Xcode that helps reduce the total application size and improve performance. Compression, however, could be taken a lot further. In ImageOptim’s case study, they took a look at TweetBot for the iPad, a graphically rich application that contains over 26 MB of compressed images. When ImageOptim optimized the uncompressed versions of those images through their application, and twice over in combination with ImageAlpha, they saw a dramatic reduction in file size and loading times.

Disabling Xcode conversion and simply using ImageOptim instead was enough to reduce the application size by almost 30% (33.4MB down to 23.8MB) and halve initial display time in the benchmark.

Manually optimizing images with ImageAlpha reduced entire application size by more than a half (33.4MB down to 16.3MB). Images alone were 65% smaller and were displayed 2.5 times quicker than Xcode-optimized ones.

ImageOptim claims that developers can submit applications that don’t use Xcode’s compression method, point to resources showing how this can be done, and also link to an excellent success story. Developers should definitely check out the examples and data provided on their blog post to see how they can better optimize their apps. [ImageOptim via @cbowns]

Permalink