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By Mikhail Madnani on

Apple’s Inconsistencies in its Own iOS Apps

Apple’s Inconsistencies in its own iOS apps

Benjamin Mayo takes a look at how inconsistent Apple is with its own design guidelines through iconography of the share sheet icon:

My gripe is there is no consistency, no structure or logic to this. Apps introduced later sometimes use rounded icons, sometimes not, sometimes create all-new custom glyphs of their own. Incredulously, you could open flagship apps like Messages, Mail and Safari1 and have no idea Apple was even playing with bold icons as a conceptual change. These apps adopted the iOS 11 large bold navigation bar title formats, but their icons and glyphs have stagnated for more than four years at this point.

This isn’t really new. I was just discussing with Preshit how few of Apple’s own apps I end up using on my iOS devices and how inconsistent their designs have been over the last few years. A lot of the subtle changes are good but inconsistencies like this are not good.

By Akshay Pathare on

Panic is Working on Coda Next, and A Second Video Game After Firewatch

Panic is Publishing a Second Game after Firewatch

Panic, one of the most popular developers for quality iOS and Mac software, have published their 2017 Report that takes a look at what has happened at the company last year.

There’s a lot to gather from there, so I recommend that you add the URL to your favorite “read later” app. But if you’re still in a hurry, here are some notable bits from it:

The company released Transmit 5 and shipped a record total of 39 releases across all their apps. They also improved their QA process and their help library, started releasing tutorial videos on their official YouTube channel and also improved the infrastructure powering their websites.

In the coming months, Panic will publish Firewatch for Nintendo Switch and work is underway for “Coda Next”, which is what they’re calling “a total rewrite of our macOS version of Coda”. Last but not the least, there’s this:

A Second Game

Soon we will also announce the second video game we’ll be publishing! The follow-up to our hit game Firewatch will be a new game from a different studio that is not at all like Firewatch but is absolutely delightful. Keep an eye on our blog and Twitter for the big reveal.

Panic is one of the most revered companies out there, and I can’t wait to see what 2018 is going to be like for them.

By Mikhail Madnani on

Pocket Casts Gets Acquired by NPR and Other Public Radio Stations

Pocket Casts Gets Acquired by NPR and Other Public Radio Stations

Shifty Jelly is one of my favourite developers out there. Pocket Casts is one of the rare apps that we feature almost every year in the end of year Highlight and of course through covering their lovely big updates that happen across platforms multiple times a year. Pocket Casts is also one of my favourite apps on all platforms. When they announced that WNYC, NPR, WBEZ and This American Life as a group approached them and acquired Pocket Casts, both Preshit and myself were pretty shocked.

Their blog post goes on multiple times to ensure that users and customers know that nothing will change going forward for Pocket Casts as an app. I’m beyond happy for the team. I spoke to Russel in depth on The Dialogue and hope to do another one with him in the future once things settle. This is a huge deal for the team and I wish them the best with this.

I’m curious to see what this big partnership entails for podcasts as a whole because Pocket Casts is basically podcasts for me at this point.

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