I’ve heard mixed reviews on the new iOS 10 beta’s music app. Long-time readers will no doubt remember that I gave up playing music on my iPhone altogether a while back, due to the Music app being completely incongruous with the way I listen to music, not to mention constant issues with songs not downloading, going missing, etc. So I’ve been happily using my old iPod Classic for a while now. And that’s going great, actually. The old iPod is still working. But I’m a…

I don’t think that Apple’s design for the app is completely wrong, I just think they need to modify it a bit. First, I’d move the Custom timer option to the top. Even if there are common timers you set, I would wager that most people want to set a custom one most of the time. I could be wrong, but if I’m not, this would make most people’s default interaction a little easier. Next, I’d allow users to customize what their pre-set timers…

Minutes before the WWDC keynote last week, I posted this on Twitter, in reaction to the already growing cynicism (the show hadn’t even started yet) in my timeline about what was to be announced. Apple didn’t get you a pony. Get that into your head now, and you’ll enjoy the keynote so much more. — jcieplinski (@jcieplinski) June 13, 2016 Listening to the Apple community gripe about what they perceive to be too little excitement in keynote announcements drives me insane. People either perceive some announcements to be…

Sometimes, the timing of a thing just works. When I talked with Curtis Herbert a few weeks ago about wanting to expand my horizons with the client work I’ve been doing up until now, he immediately piped in that he was thinking along the same lines. We both wanted to do more than just design and build things for people. We wanted to share our business experience in mobile apps and services with others. I’ve known Curtis for a long time. I know he’s a solid coder…

The approach involved creating the icon twice: once as a textured 3D model, and again as a stack of Photoshop shape layers. This seemed nuts — doing twice the work for the same result. Yet there are benefits. The freedom to scale up an icon indefinitely without rerendering is among them. But, more importantly, the Russian “double-drawn” method affords a much higher degree of control. (via John Marstall on Medium. Linked via The Loop) This is very similar to the method I used on the Teleprompt+ 3 icon. I created a…