Great points, except for "@2x only." If your app supports iPads, then the iPad 2 and iPad Mini (first generation) are both non-Retina screens and are still available for sale directly from Apple. Given Apple's 3 year support cycles, iOS 10 will be the first iOS that can fully drop support for non-retina displays if the iPad 2 and original iPad mini are discontinued by the end of this year.
iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do
11–20 of 82 posts
Re: iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do
#12Actually, that doesn't seem very sane to me. Why are we doing additional work for functionality that we already created, and losing support for people on older versions? Sure if you are a making a new app it makes sense to use great new features. It doesn't make sense to delete code that is working and redo it just because the new way is easier. 0 effort >>>> small effort times 10.
Re: iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do
#13There isn't anything in this article that explains why you can't support both. The only sentence about this is "We can’t leverage what iOS 7 has to offer and a lot of the UI is compromise.", which doesn't cite any difficulties they've run into. The only iOS 7 features they mention are UIDynamics and the receding keyboard—the rest are iOS 5/6 features.
I agree that the article could've gone into more depth about the difficulties they faced, but most developers will agree "a lot of the UI is compromise" is the key point. Supporting iOS 6 and 7 visuals at the same time just means your app looks out of place in both versions.
Re: iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do
#14Great points, except for "@2x only." If your app supports iPads, then the iPad 2 and iPad Mini (first generation) are both non-Retina screens and are still available for sale directly from Apple. Given Apple's 3 year support cycles, iOS 10 will be the first iOS that can fully drop support for non-retina displays if the iPad 2 and original iPad mini are discontinued by the end of this year.
Our app is iPhone only, but this is a great point to remember for anyone thinking about dropping the non-retina image.
Re: iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do
#15Actually, that doesn't seem very sane to me. Why are we doing additional work for functionality that we already created, and losing support for people on older versions? Sure if you are a making a new app it makes sense to use great new features. It doesn't make sense to delete code that is working and redo it just because the new way is easier. 0 effort >>>> small effort times 10.
When you introduce new people to the development team, less code means less issues.
Old code had nasty things like traversing the UIView hierarchy and removing unwanted UIViews.
Old code had deprecation warnings.
Old code is not optimized. Apple are doing a much better job at creating great working UIKit controls for us.
Any day that I delete code is a good day.
Re: iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do
#16There isn't anything in this article that explains why you can't support both. The only sentence about this is "We can’t leverage what iOS 7 has to offer and a lot of the UI is compromise.", which doesn't cite any difficulties they've run into. The only iOS 7 features they mention are UIDynamics and the receding keyboard—the rest are iOS 5/6 features.
I agree that the article could've gone into more depth about the difficulties they faced, but most developers will agree "a lot of the UI is compromise" is the key point. Supporting iOS 6 and 7 visuals at the same time just means your app looks out of place in both versions.
> Supporting iOS 6 and 7 visuals at the same time just means your app looks out of place in both versions.
It's just a little more work. Facebook looks the same on iOS 6 even now that it supports iOS 7.
If you are mostly using native UI with only a few customisations, I don't see the problem.
Re: iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do
#17Great points, except for "@2x only." If your app supports iPads, then the iPad 2 and iPad Mini (first generation) are both non-Retina screens and are still available for sale directly from Apple. Given Apple's 3 year support cycles, iOS 10 will be the first iOS that can fully drop support for non-retina displays if the iPad 2 and original iPad mini are discontinued by the end of this year.
Our app is iPhone only, but this is a great point to remember for anyone thinking about dropping the non-retina image.
People with non-retina iPads can and will download your app.
Re: iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do
#18> When we added pull to refresh to our app there weren’t many apps using this technique and it added a premium feel to our app. This makes me want to vomit. I can't wait until implementing flashy UI is so trivial and common that shallow things like this don't actually affect an application's perceived value. I don't remember the transition to GUI in the 80s as being as shallow as the mobile app market is.
> I don't remember the transition to GUI in the 80s as being as shallow as the mobile app market is. Then you weren't there. I'm pretty sure the first caveman to use a different pigment in cave paintings got the same shallow reactions.
There are STILL programs out there that claim to have a GUI, but the so-called "GUI" is really just a window frame around a terminal emulator.
Re: iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do
#19Right to the point information. GREAT.
I've been programming on a daily basis for iOS even before the SDK came out (ohhh those reverse engineering days...!). Two years ago I left the job and since then I've always wondered what were the relevant changes in the SDK, just in case I get back to programming iOS again. And here we have it!
Re: iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do
#20There isn't anything in this article that explains why you can't support both. The only sentence about this is "We can’t leverage what iOS 7 has to offer and a lot of the UI is compromise.", which doesn't cite any difficulties they've run into. The only iOS 7 features they mention are UIDynamics and the receding keyboard—the rest are iOS 5/6 features.
I agree that the article could've gone into more depth about the difficulties they faced, but most developers will agree "a lot of the UI is compromise" is the key point. Supporting iOS 6 and 7 visuals at the same time just means your app looks out of place in both versions.
> Supporting iOS 6 and 7 visuals at the same time just means your app looks out of place in both versions.
Assuming you want it to look exactly the same on both. I have an app that offers a flat, stylised look on iOS 6 and a completely native iOS 7 look on iOS 7.