Today, we’ve been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store.1 We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we’ve been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch. Needless to say, we’re quite disappointed with their decision, and we’re working hard to once again make the application available for you, our users.

As far as we can tell, Airfoil Speakers Touch is in full compliance with Apple’s posted rules and developer agreements. We’ve already filed an appeal with Apple’s App Review Board, and we’re awaiting further information. Unfortunately, Apple has full control of application distribution on iOS, leaving us with no other recourse here.

As some users may recall, we have been through this before, with Airfoil Speakers Touch no less. We hope to be able to resolve things in similar fashion, and once again provide you with this top-notch tool.

For my internship I created a methodology to test the security of mobile applications. After I finished it I decided to take a look at WhatsApp and test the methodology I created. Several new vulnerabilities were found, including a very severe one that even affected people not using WhatsApp. But before going into detail let's first investigate the security history of WhatsApp.

I found that many iPhone and iPad users don’t know that they can add their favorite web sites to the Home Screen and interact with them like standard native applications. This script helps them to discover this great feature and suggests the steps needed to add your web app to the dashboard.

A few days ago I updated this site’s Web clip icon to be 300×300 pixels.

It looks great in Reeder, and it looks good as a Home screen icon on new and old iPads and on the iPhone 4/4S.

There are two (yea, three) ways to upload your Web clip icon and make it discoverable:

Although Xcode image compression is better than nothing, the “CgBi” images are larger and slower than well optimized, standard PNGs.

Disabling Xcode conversion and simply using ImageOptim instead was enough to reduce the application size by almost 30% (33.4MB down to 23.8MB) and halve initial display time in the benchmark.

Manually optimizing images with ImageAlpha reduced entire application size by more than a half (33.4MB down to 16.3MB). Images alone were 65% smaller and were displayed 2.5 times quicker than Xcode-optimized ones.

Since Xcode conversion can be disabled and iOS supports standard PNGs, such big size and speed savings are possible in actual AppStore applications.

While the focus of Wednesday's Apple event was primarily on "the new iPad" and the perpetual hobby that is the Apple TV, we would be remiss to forget iOS 5.1. Past point releases of the OS included notable improvements like Game Center in iOS 4.1, and the Nitro JavaScript engine, better Home Sharing, and Personal Hotspots in iOS 4.3. While Apple updated apps, and released the stunning iPhoto for iOS, how is iOS 5.1 itself likely to be compared to past releases? To some, it will be a little disappointing. 

With the help of Ars's Macintosh Achaia to refine the points for this article, here are ten annoyances that will remain with us as part of iOS—at least until the next iOS release rolls around.

So how does all this relate to a trivial review of an application like DayOne? It’s the first time I’m keeping a journal for someone other than myself. Every other thing I write is for me, but what is going into DayOne is for my Daughter. With DayOne’s Reminder integration, I get an alert every day to add another entry. A subtle encouragement to do the right thing.

DayOne is my time machine. I use it to write letters to my future daughter.[5] When she will be by age, my body will be almost 90. There’s little I can predict now about that future. I need to tell her about our family and what I was thinking while she was growing up. I try tell her about the moments that she will never remember. I hope I can explain who she is now. In these entries, I will travel to the future and explain who her dad was when she was small. I wish my Dad could have.

This might seem obvious or dumb, depending on your sensibilities, but the new Messages app makes a decent universal clipboard.

Copy a link, photo or text and paste into iMessage on Mac, iPhone or iPad.1
Send a message to myself.
Boom.

Take, for example, the case of iOS developer Anton Sinelnikov. By looking at the screenshot taken a few weeks ago, you are faced with an incredible feat. Sinelnikov has managed to create not just one popular iOS app, but several! Hits like Plants vs. Zombies, Temple Run, Tiny Wings and Angry Birds, all coming from one developer!

Oh. Wait a second. My mistake, it turns out that instead of coming up with original ideas, Sinelnikov takes a different strategy. He copies other applications, takes a similar name, and then forces the application into the Top 100 list, where users mistake it for the original app. After a day or so, Apple notices that these apps aren’t actually providing they promise and kick the apps out, but not before users spend tens of thousands of dollars on the apps – money that the developers get to keep, as users rarely ask for a refund.

Of course, this wouldn’t be such a big deal if it was one developer, but the problem is that close to a dozen scam apps have made their way into the Top lists on the iOS App Store, netting a veritable fortune for the scammers. Some developers have been pointing this out for a while, asking Apple to fix the situation and be proactive. Apple has yet to respond with the needed force.

We honestly thought we had satisfied all of Apple’s complaints about Air Dictate. But what we failed to anticipate is that they might just totally make up an excuse to reject Air Dictate 2.0, for the sheer sport of it.

Q: How do I access my last saved email draft on my iDevice?

A: There is the long way, which is using “Mailboxes”, then scroll down to Accounts, select an account, click Drafts, then click on the draft. To go back to unified email inbox, you then have to hit back two times, then select All Inboxes. It’s surely long and tedious.

Short way: hold the Compose button (annotation 2) to bring up your last saved draft.

The shortcut to last draft is saved as long as you don’t restart your device. If you restarted the device, as of iOS 5.0.1, you have to use the long way to access your last draft.

Drafting this one for 2014, because we like to write our blog posts a couple years early at Impending. Let’s hope I’ll never have to dig it up again.

As we’ve learned from Apple’s latest earnings call, App Store revenue growth for developers has begun to stall and slip behind device sales, resulting in many beloved indie studios closing shop or selling to larger companies, folding to the pressure and tighter profit margins.

Considering the past two years with hundreds of scams, fraud apps, hoaxes, and clones that have hit the top of the charts, it’s no surprise the atmosphere in 2014 among both App Store customers and app developers can only be described as cynical.

Most significantly, what we once took for granted before 2012, the “impulse buy”, has largely evaporated. Consumer trust in apps is now completely broken, and even customer reviews can’t be trusted due to more and more elaborately sleazy services for hire to game the system. In this fallout, we have come to understand how important the impulse buy was in a market environment dominated by rock bottom pricing. Developers have raised app pricing to compensate, kicking into effect a feedback loop resulting in sustaining revenue (for now) but plummeting sales, reach and cultural relevance for popular apps.

Customers have also in turn begun to rely more and more heavily on existing giant brands, and are avoiding less trustworthy upstarts, independent developers and studios, and apps that stray from the familiar. As a result innovation in the App Store is in a slow death spiral.

I remember early in 2012, which we can now recognize as the peak of an App Store bubble, when what felt like a utopia took a distinct left turn for the worse with the first wave of scams. Now that we’re stuck in this hole, the road to recovery, if it exists at all, will be painful and take years of education and pro-active improvements from Apple.

iOS knows when I’ve read an iMessage, and when I’ve unlocked the screen. OS X knows if I’ve got Messages running, and if I’ve moved the mouse cursor recently (and thus likely haven’t walked away from my laptop). When it’s clear that I’m at one terminal, the others shouldn’t be buzzing away. They should, of course, continue syncing the messages — but if I’ve just responded to something on OS X, my iPhone and iPad ought to stop screaming. Once it becomes even the slightest bit unclear where I am (if, say, my portables don’t send any read receipts back to the server and I’ve suddenly stopped responding on OS X), sure — let’em sing.

Too hacky? Fine. Give me a button that lets me say “I’m on this device. Silence iMessage everywhere else” that automatically disables itself once I’ve sent an iMessage from another device.

I unashamedly maintain that there is so much more to being successful on the mobile web than dealing with screen size. But I do accept that dealing with screen size is at least a first step.

Thank goodness then, that the matter of screen size is so simple and well understood.

Really?

As web developers, we will often need to know the screen size of the device we are displaying content on. Perhaps on the server, perhaps on the client, perhaps to be used as a clause in a media query.

But how best to measure it? And what are we measuring anyway? On the client-side, for instance, a variety of ways exist to determine screen and page size: things like screen.width, window.outerWidth, document.body.clientWidth, and so on. But these properties are infamously unspecified by any standards: so what do they all mean – and how reliable are they on mobile browsers?

Apple - please give some serious attention to the mess you’re creating with your Calendar APIs and apps, please. I could complain about the mess you caused by duplicating calendars when people upgraded to Lion to be able to support Reminders outside of event calendars, or I could complain about how you’ve yet to provide a way to use your CalendarStore framework to sync directly to iCloud and still require iCal to do this, but I won’t. 
I will, however, complain loudly about the mess and inconsistency shown with your current implementation of Reminders. (Specifically, the concept of “due times”, which you fail to properly implement in 2/3 of your own calendar apps). It is impossible to create a Reminder due on a certain time with Lion’s iCal, or even iCloud.com!

Grazing Push for Alfred will allow you to push a URL to any iDevice associated with your Grazing Push account. No more having to rely on bookmarklets and the site to push data to your iDevice. Just open up Alfred and send away.

Those who have had a phone lost or stolen are familiar with the horrors that follow: the thief (or the person he sold your phone to) starts to send texts as you to your family and friends, leaving you scrambling to de-activate the device as soon as possible. For modern iPhone owners, though, such a phenomenon should be in the distant past thanks to the advent of remote wipe capabilities, right?

Perhaps not. Some unlucky iPhone owners are beginning to discover that, despite their best efforts to remove all information from their stolen phones, thieves and unsuspecting buyers are still able to send and receive iMessages as the original owner—even after the device is registered under a new account. Almost nothing seems to work—remote wiping, changing Apple ID passwords, or even moving the old phone number to a new phone—and users are becoming more than frustrated that thieves are so easily able to pose as them.

I use the multitasking drawer a lot. So much that the double tap of the home button is no longer cutting it. It feels slow and interrupts my flow when using the device.

To make matters worse, the home button on my iPhone is no longer as responsive as it should be. A double tap is often interpreted as a single tap which means that instead of showing the multitasking drawer it either closes the app, or if I'm already on the home screen it takes me to the search page.

A simple gesture would decrease the wear and tear of the hardware button, and also speed up the usage of the multitasking drawer. You simply start dragging from outside the bottom of the screen and move your finger onto the screen. This edge swipe would activate the multitasking drawer.

This could be an optional setting, in the same way that Apple has made the iPad gestures optional. Certain apps might have a conflicting gesture, or a novice user might activate it accidentally. So the default behavior should probably be to have this turned off.

After extensively testing both of the primary scrolling options for jQuery Mobile I feel like the jQuery Mobile Scrollview is the best solution. It was very easy to install and configure, offered great support on iPhone and Android devices, and has more options and configurations available to customize your application. In addition, it may at some point be integrated into jQuery mobile as default functionality to serve as a bridge until position:fixed and overflow are full supported by the majority of active smartphones.

The announcement that Nexus One users won’t be getting upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich led some to justifiably question Google’s support of their devices. I look at it a little differently: Nexus One owners are lucky. I’ve been researching the history of OS updates on Android phones and Nexus One users have fared much, much better than most Android buyers.

I went back and found every Android phone shipped in the United States1 up through the middle of last year. I then tracked down every update that was released for each device - be it a major OS upgrade or a minor support patch - as well as prices and release & discontinuation dates. I compared these dates & versions to the currently shipping version of Android at the time. The resulting picture isn’t pretty - well, not for Android users:

Disclaimer: Any creation of a mockup through this website happens at your own risk. Note that your mockups are not protected in any way other than by a non-obvious URL. I can not be held responsible if you create a mockup and your competition figures out how to access it. Mockups can contain user-uploaded images and user-entered text. View at your own discretion. I do not watch, see or check this user-generated content in any way, and can not be held responsible for images uploaded by users of this site or text entered by users of this site.

As one of the oldest applications of the Internet, e-mail has never been known for having top-notch security. This reputation isn't completely undeserved: even today, anyone who knows how to bring up the preferences of a mail program can send out messages with any "From:" address they please. Ironically, such forged messages may travel to and from mail servers over encrypted connections. This helps make sure that nosy types with big WiFi antennas don't get to see your mail or passwords, but it doesn't keep your mail safe from equally nosy mail server admins—or subpoenas by nosy governments.

But not all hope is lost for e-mail. Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) can secure your mail by encrypting a message at the source and only decrypting it once it's in the hands of the receiver. S/MIME also supports digital signatures, so you can know for sure who sent the message and that it wasn't changed in transit. (Big caveat: the nosy governments could still be in cahoots with the certificate authorities, so we make no promises there.)

In the past, we've written about GPGMail, a plug-in that lets Apple's Mail.app use GNU GPG encryption. Unfortunately, GPG is a pretty unwieldy system and GPGMail could take a very long time to be updated for a new Mac OS X release. (There is currently a stable version available for Snow Leopard and an alpha version for Lion.)

The advantage of S/MIME is that it's built into Mail on the Mac and, as of last week, also in iOS. (I've only tried this using iOS 5 on an iPhone 4, but I assume things work much the same on iPads and iPod touches.) 

The initial reaction to the iPhone 4S was cooler than Apple might have hoped. Expectations had been hyped to such a point that people were looking for a leap forward equivalent to the first iPhone. When they couldn't immediately see it, many were disappointed. But that leap was there — it's just not one that is easily seen. Siri, the new iPhone's voice-control software, is going to have as big an impact as that first iPhone did. It's going to fundamentally change our relationship with computers.

As exciting as every new major iOS release is, there’s just as much if not more excitement in finding the little things that no one knows about. Apple spends a lot of time creating major additions and changes for their releases, and then lets the users try to figure out all the small stuff. Well, not everyone has time to figure them out or doesn’t want to go through the effort to do so. This is where MacStories comes in. We know our readers are all about the details, so we went on to scan, search and pry our way through iOS 5 to find many of the hidden treasures that will make your iOS experience even better.

Just installed the new iOS 5 on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch? There's a lot of great features to check out and play around with. After messing around with it on my iPhone 4 for a few minutes, these seven additions caught my attention. Check them out below—and tell us what your favorite new features are in the comments below.

Start groups with the people already in your contacts. When you send a message, everyone instantly receives it. It’s like a private chat room that works on any phone.

pan.js adds native-like panning functionality any HTML element that is bigger than it’s container. Optimized for iPad and iPhone and desktop browsers.

Try moving the mountains using you finger (iPad/iPhone), mousewheel/trackpad or click/drag.

Native scrolling for mobile web apps... or at least the closest thing to it!

Scrollability is a single script, it's small, and it has no external dependencies. Drop it into your page, add a few CSS classes to scrollable elements, and scroll away.

Scrollability is a work-in-progress and is not yet ready to be used. I will publish documentation when it's ready.

I’ve had laptops and cellular internet connectivity for 7 years, but I never would have done something like this before. Why?

I wouldn’t have been able to easily find a good app to do this without being bombarded with spam in my Google search. (And many of them would be Windows-only.)
When I did finally find an app that looked reasonable, I wouldn’t have been able to find any trustworthy reviews, being bombarded instead by more search spam.
When I went to buy it, it probably would have cost more.
I wouldn’t have trusted it comfortably enough to install it on my computer.
It might not even work.
If it did work, I’d probably need longer to figure out its learning curve, and navigating wouldn’t be as easy or fast with a keyboard and trackpad.
Taking out the laptop in the car, and passing around a laptop to show the final product, would feel much clunkier than using the iPad.
The computing revolution brought on by iOS, the hardware, and the App Store ecosystem is a bigger deal than we realize.

Prototypes for Mac turns your flat mockup images into tappable and sharable prototypes that run on iPhone or iPod touch.

If you’ve ever had to restore an iOS device from its iTunes backup—for example, if you’ve upgraded to a new phone, or if Apple has replaced an iPhone that was having problems—there’s a good chance you’ve come across one of the most frustrating bugs in the iTunes/iOS 4 system: Much of your painstakingly created Home-screen organization is wiped out. Specifically, most of your third-party apps are no longer on the screens where you placed them, and while a few of your folders may remain, even those are missing most of their original contents (which are instead scattered across various screens).

Encrypting your data on your iPad or iPhone is a great way to protect yourself on the off chance you lose your device. Even if someone plugs your device into a computer, they ideally won’t be able to steal all of your data. On current iOS devices, encrypting is as simple as setting a passcode.

Encryption in iOS 3 and then iOs 4 -- I say “ideally” because it turns out to be a little more complicated than simple setting a passcode.

Notifications: Obviously, the notifications UI is one of webOS’ core strengths. Not even Android handles incoming information and user notifications this elegantly. On the tablet, they settled with bringing them up in the status bar. Android (on phones) also puts notification icons in the status bar, and with the status (wifi, battery, network, alarm) icons, it quickly turns into a bar literally filled with icons and badges. This made me a bit pessimistic about the notification handling on webOS for tablets.

Fortunately, it’s actually quite great. Notifications slide in from the top, separate from the clock and status information: something like an email would come in, show sender and subject and then slide right and fade out into a subtle white email icon. The notifications get their own, clearly demarcated area in the status bar and some can even be swiped through from there:



Overall, a very nicely designed experience. Once again, iOS looks rather bad with either only using badges or tiny, yet modal dialogs interrupting your workflow.

The process of loading a URL in a new tab on iPad can be rather cumbersome and slow. First, one launches Safari from the home screen, waits for the app to open and the old webpage to re-render, then one hits the tab switch button, presses the new tab space, waits for that tab to open, waits for it to switch to the search panel (this is the most irritating part of the process, since it seems to take even longer when what one really wants is the URL bar), and finally, one clicks on the URL bar to enter in a new URL.

To simplify this process considerably, just add a new icon to your Springboard that goes directly to about:blank. Details after the jump.

Ensuring that your iPhone or iPad app is accessible (in this case, to visually impaired users) is the right thing to do, and thankfully it’s very easy – in many cases, there’s no work to do at all. This article for iOS developers describes how to implement accessibility support.

Even from the earliest brainstorming days for our new version of Gmail for iPhone and Android-powered devices, we knew we wanted to try something novel with menu actions: a context-sensitive, always-accessible UI element that follows conveniently as a user scrolls. Thus, the "floaty bar" was born! It took us a surprisingly long time, experimenting with different techniques and interactions, to converge on the design you see today. Let's look under the covers to see how the animation is achieved. You may be surprised to find that the logic is actually quite simple!

iOS 4.2 is a free update for every iPhone, iPod or iPad device available now. This new release provides some major changes on HTML5 and W3C future standards support, like WebSockets and Accelerometer support, print support, new JavaScript data-types and better SVG support.

Apple didn’t update yet Safari documentation to reflect these new APIs. This information is based on JavaScript research and testing over Safari itself I’ve been doing.

Am I the last person to discover that double-tapping the top/bottom of a WebView (incl. Safari) pages up/down?

One of my most common feature requests is for Instapaper to periodically download articles in the background. A lot of people forget to launch the app to let it download content before going underground or boarding a plane.

I’ve already received multiple emails from people who are excited for iOS 4’s multitasking because they can’t wait for this to finally stop being an issue, because they think Instapaper will be able to download articles periodically in the background.

It’s painful to respond, crushing their hopes, to tell them that the iOS multitasking system doesn’t allow me to do that.

By naming these features “multitasking”, Apple has set customers’ expectations to include what apps can do in a traditional computer multitasking environment.

It’s going to mislead people into expecting such behavior from apps, but we can’t actually deliver most of it.