Obviously the biggest news of last week was Apple's event where they announced the iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3, Yosemite, retina iMacs, and the imminent availability of iOS 8.1 and Apple Pay. I'm still very happy with my retina iPad mini, and can't imagine any scenario where I would've wanted to upgrade, and the iPad mini 3 doesn't offer a sufficiently compelling reason to spend the cash.
But, that said, if I was still using an iPad 2 or 3, or an original iPad mini, I'd probably be pretty tempted to upgrade right now. And, I think that's Apple's game: provide sufficiently compelling new value over the course of 2-3 years that current users feel urged to, uh, splurge. I upgrade my iPhone every year, but I know fewer and fewer people—including developers—who do the same. The iPhone 5s, 64-bit CPU notwithstanding, didn't offer that many compelling reasons to upgrade from a 5. The 6, on the other hand, got all of the iPhone 5 users I know to upgrade on launch day.
Assuming that this anecdotal evidence is part of a broader trend, this would certainly explain why Apple is moving as aggressively as it is into new markets like China, as well as new product categories like payments and the Apple Watch: in order to sustain the revenue growth they've seen over the past couple years, they need to add billions of dollars to their top line every quarter.
Best,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- The problematic culture of "Worse is Better"
- Mac App Store: The Subtle Exodus
- Apple says WatchKit SDK will let developers begin writing Watch apps in November
- The iPad zombie
Control of the Week
Google Material Design Icons
Weekly Roundup
Typhoon Swift Example
Swift example application for Typhoon. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
BMYScrollableNavigationBar
DRColorPicker
TGCameraViewController
Custom camera with AVFoundation. Beautiful, light and easy to integrate with iOS projects. MIT licensed. |
MMP_EmojiPicker
Emoji Picker for iOS applicaions MIT licensed. |
OneShotLocationManager
A replacement class for CLLocationManager for when you want to easily fetch just once the current device location MIT licensed. |
BirthdayPlaceholder
This is a UITextField shouldChangeCharactersInRange delegate implementation that keeps the placeholder text displayed as the user types MIT licensed. |
BRBubbles
Recreating the Watch main interface. MIT licensed. |
BHTabViewSplitVC
A iOS8 universal template for embedding a UISplitViewController in a UITabViewController MIT licensed. |
SFlatButton
Create a Buttons in Swift like Bootstrap 3.0 GPL licensed. |
CHPlaceholder
Placeholder views for iOS. MIT licensed. |
SpringySlider
CrossNavigation
RadialTransition_objC
Great radial transition for navigation controller, with custom back swipe. License unspecified. |
RadialTransition_swift
Great radial transition for navigation controller, with custom back swipe. License unspecified. |
CKTextField
Enhanced UITextField, with improved visuals for a sweet UX. MIT licensed. |
Tweaker
Tweaker is a library that makes it easy to play around with values (e.g. animation speed) without having to rebuild your application Custom licensed. |
SwiftyJSON
The better way to deal with JSON data in Swift
MIT licensed. |
STAlertView
A block-based wrapper for UIAlertView. MIT licensed. |
OTCover
A view like the Medium Personal page for iOS. MIT licensed. |
SCLAlertView-Objective-C
A port of https://github.com/vikmeup/SCLAlertView-Swift to Objective-C. MIT licensed. |
FSLineChart
A simple line chart library for iOS that is easily adjustable (size, color, line width, label displayed,...). It comes with a nice and subtle appearing animation. Apache 2.0 licensed. |
timeLineiOS
Drop-in timeline control with progress animation. MIT licensed. |
QRCodeReader.swift
Simple QRCode reader in Swift MIT licensed. |
Wethr
Wethr provides developers the ability to add location-based current weather conditions to their views as simply as adding any UIView. MIT licensed. |
CNPPopupController
KINWebBrowser
KINWebBrowser is a web browser module for your apps. Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices running iOS 7 & 8. MIT licensed. |
UIView-Easing
JBSpacer
Determines optimal spacing for resizable grids. MIT licensed. |
StatefulViewController
Placeholder views based on content, loading, error or empty states MIT licensed. |
Swift-SpriteKit-Analog-Stick
Virtual analog stick (Swift+Sprite Kit) MIT licensed. |
NFXTourViewController
This is the ViewController that the user can see in a simple way the tour image. MIT licensed. |
JMFormDescription
JMFormDescription is an Objective-C library for easily creating and managing complex structured forms. MIT licensed. |
LogDispatcher.Swift
A more powerful println(_:) MIT licensed. |
CBStoreHouseTransition
A custom transition inspired by Storehouse iOS app, also support pop gesture. License unspecified. |
DLRadioButton
A hightly customizable Radio Button for iOS MIT licensed. |
IIShortNotificationPresenter
Presents short notifications over a view. Supports queuing and 3 presentation styles. Highly configurable (queue type, layouting, displayed views). MIT licensed. |
RBCommander
Commands are used to remove all of the business logic that goes inside ViewController to their respective commands and handlers. MIT licensed. |
FCFileManager
iOS File Manager on top of NSFileManager for simplifying files management. Public Domain licensed. |
FCCurrentLocationGeocoder
FCIPAddressGeocoder
iOS Geocoder for geocode device IP Address location using GeoIP service(s) and a block-based syntax. Public Domain licensed. |