Battery life is one of the most crucial specs when it comes to any electronic device, and iOS devices tout some of the best claims in the business. But what do you do when you’re not getting anywhere close to the advertised claims? Obviously usage patterns vary, but a growing number of people are noticing drastically reduced battery life when a device is in standby most of the day.

Here are the dictation commands that have worked for me with Siri.

Created specifically for iPhone & iPad apps, they're also perfect for Android, websites, t-shirts, tattoos and more.

Robin Sloan:

This is a short but heartfelt manifesto about the difference between liking something on the internet and loving something on the internet.

Thinking it through, I realized this category-based naming convention just doesn't align with my basic mental construct of what software is. Organizing items by category makes sense in libraries and bookstores, on restaurant menus, in music and movies—but not apps. An app isn't consumable media. An app is a tool. It helps you perform an action, to do something. Modern programming languages and APIs are verb-based (think MyObject->setName() and and HTTP's GET and POST), and the user interface should be, too. That's when I settled on a verb-based folder system.

Launch apps and trigger actions from a quick, easy to use app! Call a friend, start an email, send a text, post to Twitter, turn on a flashlight — get to where you're going faster than ever before.

A free testing service for mobile developers, managers and testers.

NimbleKit is a fast & fun way to develop apps for iPhone and iPod touch. You don't need to know Objective-C or to be an experienced programmer. All you need is to know HTML and JavaScript. NimbleKit will integrate to Xcode and do the rest!

Link to Dropbox. Write Markdown-formatted text. Use your favorite TextExpander snippets. Do quick research to find reference materials. Lookup or substitute words from Terminology app. Insert quotes and links into your documents. Upload images to CloudApp. Export your writings as Markdown or HTML files. Send them to Evernote, Facebook, Posterous, Tumblr and Twitter. Or use the generated HTML for your blog post. Your choice.

The sum of all human knowledge about iPhoneOS Development.

The review system is not for leaving bug or support related questions, for example, ‘How do I add a favourite?’ or ‘Your app just crashes’. Users are much better off emailing the developer in question so they can help resolve the problem. By all means if they don’t respond, tell people in reviews. All too often I see support issues in the review system. Developers have no way whatsoever to respond to these, both sides loose out when support problems end up as 1 star reviews. Dev’s get a bad rep & have no idea how to reproduce the problem and the user still has no way to resolve the issue.

Learning the subtleties of Helvetica and Garamond used to be a pain—but a sleek new app has made the process easier

Final Draft uses a file format called .fdx. If you've ever attempted to open one of these files on the iPad, you know it's not pretty. You get raw XML. You get brackets and code.

Lately, I hardly even open my laptop during the teaching day and mostly use it for heavy emailing and document creation before school and at the end of the day, and for reading, writing, and researching in the evening at home. So, my digital desktop (While always evolving, it’s more consistent than any physical desk space that I use.) has been less Mac OS desktop and more iOS desktop. I was only going to show the first page of apps on my iPod desktop, but as we sat at his December desk, Stephen encouraged me to show all of the pages. View large or full size.

Angry Birds is the first waste of 75 millions people’s time that can be accurately quantified. Every day, users spend 200 million minutes — 16 years every hour — playing the mobile game. Three trillion pigs have been popped. It has filled billions of those interstitial moments spent riding the bus, on a plane or in important work meetings, and it is or has been the number-one paid app on iTunes in 68 countries, as well as the best-selling paid app of all time.

Really. It’s great. Every time that box comes up from a new app asking permission to send me push notifications, I’ve said no, because none of them have ever been important enough to interrupt me at any time of day.

As much as I wanted an iPhone, buying one would have been an incredibly irrational decision. So I didn’t. Sure, I got to enjoy the iPhone’s greatness indirectly through iPod Touches and the iPad, but I stayed with Verizon for my phone needs and became an early adopter of Android when Motorola released its original Droid in the fall of 2009.<br />
About 63 weeks later, the iPhone finally came to Verizon. The rest is happy history.

So, here’s my guess at Apple’s iPad plans for 2011:<br />
An iPad 2, fairly soon. Say, a March announcement, shipping in the first week of April. Faster, more RAM, maybe more storage, thinner and lighter, a front-facing camera.1 Running iOS 4.3.<br />
iOS 5, announced at a developer event in March, shipping in June.<br />
iPad 3, shipping in September, announced at the annual iPod event. Running iOS 5.1, same as the next-generation iPod Touch.

There’s more than one way for developers to access fonts. This list is based on cycling through UIFont. However, there are a few more fonts available via Core Text. I’m debating on a design for displaying Core Text fonts in a meaningful way.

Opacity is an easy to use program for drawing graphics for the screen. It's great for making resolution independent images and icons for applications and the web.

I'm Neven Mrgan, a designer at Panic Inc. I design whatever needs designing.

The key to good writing is not that magical glass of Bordeaux, the right kind of tobacco or that groovy background music. The key is focus. What you need to write well is a spartan setting that allows you to fully concentrate on your text and nothing but your text. Many professional writers use SimpleText or Textedit because these are the only writing programs that are totally distraction free. But text editors are not perfect. That’s why we made Writer.

With iOS 4′s launch only days away, we thought it would be interesting to provide a complete walkthrough of the new operating system. iOS 4.1 will be a free upgrade to all iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G, iPod touch 2G, and iPod touch 3G users. It will also come standard on Apple’s newly announced 4th generation iPod touch.

From Apple’s point of view, iPhone OS and web technologies share equal footing. When you visit their developer site, the Safari Dev Center is prominently displayed. The iPhone gets all the press, but when you click on Safari Dev Center, there’s a ton of great information that explains how to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on an iPhone.

Add an event in just two quick taps. See how full your week or day is at a glance. It works with the built-in iPhone calendar but it’s faster.

Reference material for beginning iPhone OS development.