In case you missed it, news came out last week that Apple is spending over half a billion dollars on sapphire glass, the same kind that's used to cover the 5s' Touch ID sensor. You might remember a few years back that Apple was looking into using a metal alloy called Liquidmetal, and did a sort of 'test deploy' with the SIM card ejection tool included with iPhones. Nothing more ever emerged, but Apple also never spent $578 million on Liquidmetal either. Does Apple really expect to spend that much money covering Touch ID sensors? Probably not. Instead, can you guess where sapphire glass is used heavily today? Yep, watch faces.
Considering that Apple hired Paul Deneve, CEO of Yves Saint Laurent, this past summer, it seems pretty clear what Tim Cook's "new product categories" for 2014 might be. I've used Pebbles and FitBits, and I have to say that I'm generally a little skeptical about the whole product category, but Apple tends to be pretty on the ball when it comes to producing devices with mass market appeal, so I'll certainly give them the benefit of the doubt. But, you still have to ask yourself, is iWatch a $70 billion/year business?
Until next time,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- Why Apple Bought $578M Worth Of Sapphire In Advance
- Vesper Sync Diary #3 - Immutability, Deleting, and Calculated Properties
- Out of the picture: why the world's best photo startup is going out of business
- Should I Use a Property or an Instance Variable? - now you know.
- Hardcore debugging
- How To Efficiently Display Large Amounts of Data on iOS Maps
- Full text search with Core Data
Weekly Roundup
TTCounterLabel
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A custom UILabel that acts as a time counter, counting up or down and formatting the string to hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. Designed to accept a value in milliseconds that is then displayed it in a time friendly format. Currently the controls supports up-to a maximum value of 99 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds and 999 milliseconds, which should be enough for most uses. The control automatically removes any leading zeros and centralises the result. It also supports different fonts for each unit division. MIT licensed. |
ASBanker
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Simplifies adding In App Purchases to iOS applications. MIT licensed. |
JSVideoScrubber
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A simple video scrubber that can be used drive navigation in video playback on iOS 7. MIT licensed. |
HATransparentView
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UIView transparent subclass based on Rdio stations menu. MIT licensed. |
PKJSONSocket
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PKJSONSocket aims to simplify network communications. It's a delightful wrapper around CocoaAsyncSocket, abstracting away complex data flow into an easy to use API. Instead of dealing with the bits and bytes yourself, PKJSONSocket offers you UTF-8 encoded JSON strings. Compiles on both iOS and OS X. MIT licensed. |
YAJL-Entity
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A JSON framework that can deserialize the JSON string into real objects, with 0.1 configuration. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
PNChart
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A simple and beautiful chart lib with animation used in Piner for iOS MIT licensed. |
ICTextView
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ICTextView is a UITextView subclass with optimized support for string/regex search and highlighting. It also features some iOS 7 specific improvements and bugfixes to the standard UITextView. MIT licensed. |
NHBalancedFlowLayout
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UICollectionViewLayout subclass for displaying items of different sizes in a grid without wasting any visual space. Inspired by: http://www.crispymtn.com/stories/the-algorithm-for-a-perfectly-balanced-photo-gallery MIT licensed. |
MZTimerLabel
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MZTimerLabel is a UILabel subclass, which is a handy way to use UILabel as a countdown timer or stopwatch just like that in Apple Clock App with just 2 lines of code. MZTimerLabel also provides delegate method for you to define the action when the timer finished. MIT licensed. |
AKNumericFormatter
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Formatter for numerical fields and UITextField category to use it easily while editing. MIT licensed. |
JYRadarChart
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an iOS open source Radar Chart implementation MIT licensed. |
VMDInstrumenter
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A simple Objective-C singleton to instrument, trace, and suppress selectors at runtime. Sometimes you need to debug a 3rd party library but you don't have access to the source code, and sometimes you want to experiment with Apple frameworks. BSD licensed. |