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iOS 8 Shows Love for HTML5→

Ross Gerbasi has an overview of great changes for web developers in iOS 8.

He notes that WKWebView, a new technology to have faster web views in third-party apps, currently has a major bug:

Remember that amazing new WebView I was just telling you all about? The one with the super fast Nitro JS engine and shiny new everything. Well, its broken… The bug here is a security issue which does not allow “WKWebView” to load files from the local filesystem. So what this means is that your embedded index.html is not accessible to the “WKWebView”. This is a blocker for PhoneGap and Cordova applications that are using offline/local files to serve up an application. So currently, if you would like to use “WKWebView” in your application, you must load your files from a remote server. For example, loading “index.html” will not work, but loading “http://www.google.com” will work just fine.

Several developers of apps I was testing told me they needed to disable WKWebView for this reason. I can’t wait for a fix.

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Essence Icons @3x→

Icons & Coffee (the side-project that I run with my girlfriend Silvia) released version 1.2 of the Essence icon set today. Essence is used in thousands of apps and it includes 350 unique icon designs in multiple versions. Today’s update adds support for the iPhone 6 Plus with @3x sizes.

From the blog post:

Following Apple’s announcements, we’ve added new PNG files for the iPhone 6 Plus (@3x); as always, PNGs are available in three colors (blue, gray, and white). We’ve also included a PNG reference so you can easily find the icon file you’re looking for in the download.

You can check out Essence 1.2 here.

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Xcode 6: Live Rendering, Visual View Debugging, and Swift

Xcode is the development environment that Apple supplies to the community for creating Mac and iOS apps. Those familiar with the tool will likely agree that working with previous versions have been nothing short of a love/hate relationship. After any update, Xcode’s quirks and crashes are never far behind, however it is one utility that Mac and iOS developers simply could not live without.

Xcode 6 brings exciting new features and enhancements including support for an entirely new programming language, improved view debugging, live view rendering, extensions, playgrounds, and more.

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Learning and Relearning iOS

In the school where I teach, we are now into our fifth school year using iPad in the classroom. We have students from 5-18 using the device and using it very differently according to their age and educational needs. We have found it to be a substantial addition to the life and work of our school and a major enhancement to the educational process.

Unlike many schools, we don’t focus on “delivering content” with the iPad. We don’t use electronic textbooks and we don’t buy a lot of curriculum materials in the form of apps. Instead, we view the iPad as a tool for creativity in the classroom. We think of apps not as replacements for books but as a new kind of pen, pencil, ruler, paintbrush, camera, music studio, art material, scientific log book, homework diary, writing pad and movie editing suite.

We have used every version of iOS since iOS 3.2 on the original iPad. Many releases have brought substantial improvements in our daily use of the iPad – for example multitasking in iOS 4 or AirPlay Mirroring in iOS 5 on the iPad 2. I think we are on course for the most substantial change to iOS since it shipped on the iPad this year.

iOS 8 brings many deep changes and improvements to the platform that we know and love to use in our school. I want to highlight a few of them, but it’s important to remember that sometimes the biggest wins are in the fixes to the small daily annoyances.

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Looking at Accessibility in iOS 8

Soon after WWDC ended in June, I wrote a piece for MacStories in which I briefly summarized all the new features Apple added to Accessibility in iOS 8. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time with the iOS 8 beta builds over the summer, and have found several features and little touches – even some things that aren’t specific to Accessibility – that merit a more detailed look. What follows are my personal impressions of such.

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iOS 8 Document Pickers, Providers, and Dropbox

In yesterday’s coverage of iOS 8 for my daily workflow and Transmit, I mentioned that I hadn’t had much time to test document pickers and provider extensions in iOS 8 and that I couldn’t grasp the full potential of Apple’s document management changes in practice. While that still holds true today, I’ve been playing around with the iOS 8 update that Dropbox launched yesterday and I thought it’d be useful to collect my thoughts on the site for future reference.

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New Page on Apple’s Website Details Their Commitment to Privacy

Apple today published a new page on their website dedicated to explaining Apple’s commitment to preserving the privacy of their customers. The webpage includes a fairly lengthy letter from CEO Tim Cook which aims to reassure customers about their privacy when using Apple products, why Apple is dedicated to preserving privacy and how their business model differs to others (a not so subtle swipe at Google). In the letter Tim Cook promises updates to the page at least every year or whenever there are significant changes to their policies.

Security and privacy are fundamental to the design of all our hardware, software, and services, including iCloud and new services like Apple Pay. And we continue to make improvements. Two-step verification, which we encourage all our customers to use, in addition to protecting your Apple ID account information, now also protects all of the data you store and keep up to date with iCloud.

The page also includes sections on how Apple’s various products have “privacy built in”, how users can manage their privacy settings to alter how much they share with other people and companies, and finally a section relating to government information requests.

Our commitment to protecting your privacy comes from a deep respect for our customers. We know that your trust doesn’t come easy. That’s why we have and always will work as hard as we can to earn and keep it.

There’s no doubt that this website is in part a response to the recent celebrity iCloud privacy breaches, and whilst it is reassuring to see Apple publicly reaffirm their stance of protecting privacy, a more important measure will be how Apple continues to improve the security mechanisms of their products so that what happened a few weeks ago doesn’t happen again. In this respect, it should be noted that Apple did enable two-factor authentication for iCloud yesterday.

iOS 8 on Older Hardware→

Every year, I’m always curious to know how the latest version of iOS works on the oldest compatible iOS hardware, and I always forget.

Thankfully, Ars Technica published two detailed looks at performance changes with iOS 8 on the iPhone 4S and iPad 2. Particularly in Andrew Cunningham’s article, it’s clear how Apple’s march towards larger screen sizes has been driving software features that take advantage of pixels to offer more room for information, search results, or toolbars.

I’m not sure I would be able to enjoy iOS 8 this much on a device like the 4S. Hopefully Apple will improve performance on older hardware like they did with iOS 7.1.

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