Did you know that Apple doesn't offer a tablet OS "that lets you work and play"? Yeah, I wasn't aware of that, either. Fortunately, our long nightmare of not being able to work and play on the iPad is finally over with this past week's release of Office for iPad. I can only assume that the release of Office for iPad was held up by the lack of a commensurate 'touch-first' version for Windows, but it seems like Satya Nadella has decided that it's time to just let go, accept the fact that the iPad is here to stay, and that Microsoft is only doing itself harm by delaying the release any further. That said, I think it's crazy that they're tying real use of Office on iPad to Office 365 instead of enabling people to access documents from Dropbox, Box, iCloud, OneDrive, but at least this is a step in the right direction.
Ultimately, the writing is on the wall for the PC. Like Steve Jobs said back in 2010, we are entering into a world where not everyone will need a PC. Gartner reports that the PC market will decline 7% in 2014, and tablet sales will go up another 39%. And, let's not forget about the mobile phone space. Reportedly, Apple has sold 500 million iPhones at this point.
Steve once said, "we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose." And he was absolutely right. Ironically, though, it looks like—whether or not Apple wins—Microsoft will lose, unless they can fully embrace where things are going.
Best,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- Vesper Sync Diary #11 - Scaling
- How clones, fear, sanitisation and free-to-play soured Apple's iOS gaming revolution
- app.itize.us
- Subjective-C
Control of the Week
FXForms
FXForms is an Objective-C library for easily creating table-based forms on iOS. It is ideal for settings pages, or user data entry tasks. zlib licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
RHRefreshControl
AFPopupView
A simple to use and functional popup view for iOS, as seen in Wunderlist iOS app. MIT licensed. |
XHScrollMenu
XHScrollMenu is a display column elements, base on NetEase News App. MIT licensed. |
iLink
CalendarStyle
Calendar component for iOS apps MIT licensed. |
AwesomeChat
AwesomeChat is a full native iPhone app to create realtime, text based chatrooms with Facebook/Twitter login. MIT licensed. |
LNWindowManager
A window manager that makes working with MIT licensed. |
DNSSwipeableTableCell
MyCategories
UIView Categories for adding:
MIT licensed. |
SSStackedView
DZNSegmentedControl
A drop-in replacement for UISegmentedControl for showing counts, to be used typically on a user profile MIT licensed. |
SMTabbedSplitViewController
ADLivelyCollectionView
MWViewsContainer
Lightweight Views container with top bar with customizable options pod 'MWViewsContainer' MIT licensed. |
UIView+draggable
UIView category that adds dragging capabilities MIT licensed. |
MBKeyboardTracker
Get the system wide keyboard and track its origin. License unspecified. |
ANBlurredTableView
StickyHeaderView
Example of how to create a UITableView HeaderView which sticks to the top and stretches when pulled down. Kind of like the Tinder app does. MIT licensed. |
BFNavigationBarDrawer
A UIToolbar subclass that can easily be displayed below a UINavigationBar, similarly to the playlist view in the Music app. BSD licensed. |
GTTranslationAPI
GoogleTranslationAPI is an Objective-C wrapper for calling the Google Translate API v2. BSD licensed. |
ZKPulseView
Simple iOS UIView Category to create a Pulse (Breathing light) Effect on your needs pod 'ZKPulseView', '~> 0.0.1' MIT licensed. |
MaryPopin
NXVLogFormatter
Simple custom CocoaLumberjack log MIT licensed. |
RestKit-InExtensions
Helpers to use RestKit with less code, just a simple plist file. MIT licensed. |
TBMInspectorView
TBMInspectorView is a copy of the Xcode 5's inspector view. It is pretty easy to setup and should be set as the documentView of a NSScrollView. MIT licensed. |
SimpleChat
An easy to use bubble chat UI as an alternative to the traditional iOS talk bubbles. MPL licensed. |
SHModelObject
Base modal object which uses objective-c runtime to populate the instance variables (ivars and properties) of User created Modal from NSDictionary objects. MIT licensed. |
MGConferenceDatePicker
MGConferenceDatePicker is an object wich extend a UIView furnishing a very nice type of data picker. MIT licensed. |
YLGIFImage
Async GIF image decoder and Image viewer supporting play GIF images. It just use very less memory. MIT licensed. |
CocoaPodUI
XCode plugin that implements CocoaPods GUI. MIT licensed. |
FBShimmeringView
An easy way to add a simple shimmering effect to any view in an iOS app, which is particularly useful as an unobtrusive loading indicator. BSD licensed. |