• Posted on

    Apple will let developers reply to reviews in the App Store

    Benjamin Mayo, writting for 9to5mac:


    Apple has announced that it will soon let developers reply to reviews on the iPhone, iPad and Mac App Stores. As part of the iOS 10.3 release notes, the company says that by the time iOS 10.3 is available to customers, developers will be able to respond to customer reviews on the App Store.

    This is a major breakthrough enhancement as developers have been asking Apple for better ways to interact with customers for a long time.

    I see a lot of pushback from the developers community this morning along the lines of: “the App Store will now be your public support channel”.

    It might be a problem but I see at least two reasons that it may be a good thing overall:

    • Good and empathetic support will reflect positively on your app (of course, if you provide no support, that might be a problem). I know it seems naive but I really think it will go a long way with the core users of your apps, the ones that buy already knowing what it does and want it to work rather than bash the dev for making them pay a few bucks.

    • If you want Apple to listen to us and (hopefully) implement more substantive changes to the store we really ought to have a constructive attitude to the changes they’re making right now. Sure, many implementation details will probably suck at first but we have to show Apple that they’re right to not be content of the status quo.

  • Posted on

    Finding the UTI of a PEM certificate on iOS

    UTI stands for “Uniform Type Identifiers”.

    It’s like the definition of a file type tying together files extensions, mime types and higher level UTIs. In iOS (and macOS also I guess) you have to provide UTI(s) to initialize the UIDocumentMenuViewController class, also known as the “iOS Document Picker”. This list will tell the system which type of files your Document Picker will be allowed to open.

    This is all good and well unless you don’t know which UTI to use for the file type your looking for.

    I was trying to import pem certificates into one of my apps and didn’t know which UTI to use for this task. Fear not, fair developer, Apple said ! Head to our official list of System Declared Uniform Type Identifiers.

    Of course, no declared UTI covered my use case. Or so I thought …

    Having wrestled with this issue for the better part of the day I have at last found this very useful site: UTI type browser.

    It’s the UTI list that Apple should have provided. There are much more types available than the one listed in the official Apple documentation. Including the one I needed:

    public.x509-certificate
    
  • Posted on

    App Transport Security enforcement delay

    Apple developper news:


    App Transport Security (ATS), introduced in iOS 9 and OS X v10.11, improves user security and privacy by requiring apps to use secure network connections over HTTPS. At WWDC 2016 we announced that apps submitted to the App Store will be required to support ATS at the end of the year. To give you additional time to prepare, this deadline has been extended and we will provide another update when a new deadline is confirmed.

    This is disappointing for the developers who had put in the effort necessary to make their apps comply with ATS. However, I suspect that Apple realized that there are just too many edge cases to really enforce this rule as is.

  • Posted on

    Raining On My Parade

    Mark Gurman reporting for Bloomberg:


    Mac fans shouldn’t hold their breath for radical new designs in 2017 though. Instead, the company is preparing modest updates: USB-C ports and a new Advanced Micro Devices Inc. graphics processor for the iMac, and minor bumps in processing power for the 12-inch MacBook and MacBook Pro. Cue the outrage.

    Well, that was quick.

  • Posted on

    Mac desktops sign of life, finally

    Tim Cook in an internal memo reported by Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch:


    The desktop is very strategic for us. It’s unique compared to the notebook because you can pack a lot more performance in a desktop — the largest screens, the most memory and storage, a greater variety of I/O, and fastest performance. So there are many different reasons why desktops are really important, and in some cases critical, to people.

    The current generation iMac is the best desktop we have ever made and its beautiful Retina 5K display is the best desktop display in the world.

    Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops. If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.

    Was it so hard, Apple ?

    Just acknowledging that your desktop line is still alive ? In my opinion, a lot of virtual ink would have been saved about the new MacBook Pros if they had said it earlier.

    Now, this doesn’t mean that we (“pro” users, whatever that means) are out of the woods the just yet. It may just be an iMac speed bump in the spring for all we know. But still, it feels much better than the void we’ve been living in for a long time.

    On a related note, I thought a bit more about the end of the Apple branded monitors: I now think that it is sign that we will never see again (in the foreseable future at least) a screenless Apple desktop. It’s one thing for Apple to send its customers to LG for a secondary display used with a laptop. It a completly different one to release a brand new machine that cannot be used without an add-on sold by another company.

    The Mac Pro and the Mac Mini won’t probably ever be updated again in their current form. Brace yourself for some kind of iMac Pro.



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