Apple Newsroom:

Apple today introduced the all-new iPad Air in an ultra-thin 10.5-inch design, offering the latest innovations including Apple Pencil support and high-end performance at a breakthrough price. With the A12 Bionic chip with Apple’s Neural Engine, the new iPad Air delivers a 70 percent boost in performance and twice the graphics capability, and the advanced Retina display with True Tone technology is nearly 20 percent larger with over half a million more pixels.

Apple today also introduced the new 7.9-inch iPad mini, a major upgrade for iPad mini fans who love a compact, ultra-portable design packed with the latest technology. With the A12 Bionic chip, the new iPad mini is a powerful multi-tasking machine, delivering three times the performance and nine times faster graphics. The advanced Retina display with True Tone technology and wide color support is 25 percent brighter and has the highest pixel density of any iPad, delivering an immersive visual experience in any setting. And with Apple Pencil support, the new iPad mini is the perfect take-anywhere notepad for sketching and jotting down thoughts on the go. The new iPads are available to order starting today and in stores next week.

I guess this is Apple clearing out a few announcements before the big event on March 25th.

Chore day!

Pretty much the entire day was spent cleaning the house, and doing boring adult things. Like cleaning every bit of washing in the house, vacuuming everywhere, and also tidying a few things up.

The two other things I’ve done today are popping out for a quick coffee with friends, and playing some World of Warcraft!

Maybe this is what adult life is like.

It was finally a day for a lie in, so luckily for me I was awake at about 11 am!

I then played World of Warcraft for a while, because there’s a pretty cool update that’s just come out!

After a while, me and my girlfriend headed into London. We had just had some chips at Five Guys for “lunch”, because at 5:30 pm we went to Body Worlds, which is an exhibition of real human bodies, showing the details of the human anatomy. It was really interesting, and it’s not possible to list everything they had on display.
It certainly opens up your perception of the human body, and provides a different perspective of what’s under our skin. Unfortunately you can’t take photos inside, otherwise this post would be full of them.

In the evening we did a few things, first of all we went to a pub to have a quick beer/cocktail, then we went to a bakery in Chinatown that we always have to visit, before we had a late Chinese buffet “dinner”.

I didn’t actually get many photos while I was it today, just these two in Chinatown:

View this post on Instagram

Chinatown, London. #shotoniphone

A post shared by Chris Hannah (@lordchrishannah) on Mar 16, 2019 at 2:29pm PDT

View this post on Instagram

Chinatown, London. #shotoniphone

A post shared by Chris Hannah (@lordchrishannah) on Mar 16, 2019 at 5:17pm PDT

A pretty relaxed day all round today! As it’s a Friday, we have a coding kata session at work, so that was fun to do. There’s also the beer fridge that opens at 4 pm, so obviously I enjoyed that! 🍻

After work, I met my family in the pub for a few drinks. And then I was out for a coffee with my friends!

Swiftly after the coffee, me and my girlfriend went good shopping, and now we’re settling down to watch the last episode of the After Life series! It’s only six episodes long, which is a bit of a shame.

There was only one thing on the blog today, and that was my thoughts on Apples response to Spotify.

I did also send another build of Text Case to beta users, but that was just to include a link to the new website in the settings page. The website happened simply because the perfect domain was available, so I had to get it and put it to good use. It’s textcase.app!

So, Apple have now posted their response to Spotifys long list of complaints against them.

It’s pretty huge, and they go against nearly every point they made. I’m hugely biased as I’m an Apple fan, but to me, everything they said makes a lot of sense.

Here are some of the sections that I found the most interesting:

What Spotify is demanding is something very different. After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem — including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers — without making any contributions to that marketplace. At the same time, they distribute the music you love while making ever-smaller contributions to the artists, musicians and songwriters who create it — even going so far as to take these creators to court.

That’s a dig at Spotify already, and they also go a bit further than their complaints, by mentioning their relationship with artists.

One thing that surprised me, was their response to Spotifys claims about Apple restricting them from platforms such as the HomePod or Apple Watch:

• When we reached out to Spotify about Siri and AirPlay 2 support on several occasions, they’ve told us they’re working on it, and we stand ready to help them where we can.
• Spotify is deeply integrated into platforms like CarPlay, and they have access to the same app development tools and resources that any other developer has.
• We found Spotify’s claims about Apple Watch especially surprising. When Spotify submitted their Apple Watch app in September 2018, we reviewed and approved it with the same process and speed with which we would any other app. In fact, the Spotify Watch app is currently the No. 1 app in the Watch Music category.

That all sounds like Spotify have actually been working with Apple successfully already.

They then went into detail on the number of free apps in the App Store, how different apps make money while Apple not taking a cut (free, ad-supported, external subscriptions, and physical good sales). They turned this at Spotify by stating that only a small fraction of their subscriptions are going through their payment platform, and that their target is to reduce that to zero. So in effect, reducing their contribution to the platform to zero.

They end with a statement about what it means to music, and also how Apple’s approach is to help grow opportunities for artists, businesses, and every person with a big idea:

We share Spotify’s love of music and their vision of sharing it with the world. Where we differ is how you achieve that goal. Underneath the rhetoric, Spotify’s aim is to make more money off others’ work. And it’s not just the App Store that they’re trying to squeeze — it’s also artists, musicians and songwriters.

Just this week, Spotify sued music creators after a decision by the US Copyright Royalty Board required Spotify to increase its royalty payments. This isn’t just wrong, it represents a real, meaningful and damaging step backwards for the music industry.

Apple’s approach has always been to grow the pie. By creating new marketplaces, we can create more opportunities not just for our business, but for artists, creators, entrepreneurs and every “crazy one” with a big idea. That’s in our DNA, it’s the right model to grow the next big app ideas and, ultimately, it’s better for customers.

We’re proud of the work we’ve done to help Spotify build a successful business reaching hundreds of millions of music lovers, and we wish them continued success — after all, that was the whole point of creating the App Store in the first place.

This is going to be really interesting to watch play out. Especially the EU court case.

There is one thing that I agree with Spotify on, and that’s the 30% cut Apple take. But I wouldn’t class that as being anti-competitive, as it’s a rule for the entire App Store. I just want it to be lower.

In general, I’m against Spotify on this one. I was unsure on a few things after the complaint was published, on things like the App Store rejections, their claim that Apple dismissed their Apple Watch app proposals, and Apple apparently not letting them on the HomePod. Apple cleared a lot of this up. And while both sides of the argument will include biases, I feel that Apple have quashed a lot of Spotifys claims.

Today was quite a slow day at work, we wrapped up our last sprint (2 weeks of work), and all the teams in the department came together to do a huge demo to each other. Mine was obviously the most interesting 😜. Seeing as I demoed a complete app that I released, and other people were demoing a lot less.

I spent some time at lunch working on some of Text various bits of copy for Text Case, and I feel like I now have a basic idea of how I’m planning the release, and also a few things afterwards.

On the blog, in linked to an article from the developer of Spectre, about how the release went, and what they have planned for the future. I’ve got a few extra things lined up that I want to share, but I didn’t find the time today.

Tonight has been spend watching things. First of all I watched the Arsenal vs Rennes game, we (Arsenal) played very well, and we came away with a 3-0 win. Which was enough to secure qualification into the Europa League quarter finals!

After that, me and my girlfriend have been continuing with After Life. We’ve managed another three episodes tonight, they’re just so funny and easy to binge watch.

Ben Sandofsky, the developer of the popular app Halide, and now Spectre, shared an update on how the Spectre launch went, and also their plan for future releases:

He also shared some photos taken on Spectre, which look amazing. The hashtag they’re using is #SpectreShot, so I may have to share some myself.

The section I found most interesting was about the initial release:

To say our launch was a success would be an understatement. On day 1, Spectre instantly rose to the first place in the App Store. We had features on The Verge, The Daily Mail, Lonely Planet, Macstories, CNet, Macrumors, 9to5Mac, Uncrate and more.

It was a bit too much success: We rose up the charts so fast that one of Apple’s fraud detection systems kicked in. For a half a day, we were missing from the charts. Yikes! We were panicking and got in touch with Apple.

Fortunately, after Apple’s fine people verified we weren’t gaming the system, we were back at #1, where we stuck it out for almost a whole week.

I had never heard about these “fraud detection systems”, but the people at iA (iA Writer Developers) wrote about it last year. It’s a huge piece of writing, and there’s a ton of great investigation as well, but essentially they found that an increase in traffic to the App Store, can negatively affect the apps ranking. That sounds pretty weird to me.

Fortunately/Unfortunately for me, none of my apps have managed to be affected by the fraud detection systems.

I was doing some interesting things at work today! We’re about to start a web project in Java, so I’ve been investigating loads of things about the frameworks we’re going to use. I’m finding it really fun!

After work I made a lot of progress to Text Case. I added in a text to Emoji format, that attempts to parse any words as emoji, and also does it’s best to randomise them if multiple options are available. I also finished up the rest of the app, so I fixed a few issues with the icon, fixed an issue with text-wrapping in the app, and then some more optimisations.

There’s a possibility that something else is added/fixed in the next few days (not a very high one though). But otherwise, I have the final build of Text Case 2.0, and I’m just about to try to work on the release process.

One thing I have to mention, is my little tweet storm earlier about Spotify taking Apple to court. That was fun.

It wasn’t as fun as the series I started watching tonight though! Me and my girlfriend started watching Ricky Gervais’ new series, After Life, on Netflix. It’s really great, and we watched three episodes back to back.

I shared just the one thing on the blog today, and that was an announcement from Twitter about the changes to the camera in the iOS app. Since then, Sean Thompson, a product designer at Twitter, shared some more of the thinking behind the changes, and also some previews.

Twitter have announced (on Twitter) that an updated camera interaction is on its way. So you’ll be able to access the camera with just one swipe:

See it? Tweet it! Our updated camera is just a swipe away, so you get the shot fast. Rolling out to all of you over the next few days. pic.twitter.com/moOEFO2nQq

— Twitter (@Twitter) March 13, 2019

This is a really good improvement. I’ve even downloaded the official Twitter app again, so I’m ready to try it out.

I’ll skip talking about my day job today, as there really isn’t anything exciting to talk about.

However, on my blog, I published three different pieces today. Not three major articles, but three different things. Firstly, I shared a story from Laurie Voss (Co-founder and Chief Data Office of NPM) about a major bank that accidentally pushed private code to the public NPM registry. Then I found this headline – “Amazon’s Alexa has 80,000 Apps—and No Runaway Hit” on Bloomberg and had to link to it. And I also saw that Professor Stephen Hawking is being commemorated on the new 50p coin, so I had to share that as well.

From a developer perspective, I pushed another build to the Text Case beta. There’s no new features in this build, but I worked on a lot of optimisations to how the UI is drawn. Especially as all content needs to be updated every time a user types in the input field, or uses the “Use Copied Text” button. Before there was some weird glitch-like behaviour, where the coloured headings would flash different colours. This is because the interface elements are “reused”, so when they’re reloaded, old components would be cleaned and configured to load the list from scratch. That wasn’t exactly necessary though, as it’s only the text content inside the interface that needs to be updated, so I’ve got a lot of manual UI handling for that now.

Another thing I did notice in the Text Case build I shared recently with custom icons, is that they’re not that optimised for all screen sizes. And for some reason the edges on the “TC” seem quite harsh. I plan on getting that fixed very soon.

Then it will be time to implement a “Text to Emoji” format, because I’m 80% sure I’m going to add it. After that I may start wrapping up the 2.0 version. Although I want as much to be in the update as possible, I really want users to use the new app. And simply adding useless things to the app is not going to benefit anyone.