Apple breaks own guidelines, “volume up” now a shutter button
Many apps, GPS Log included, wanted to implement a volume-up-as-shutter-button feature. I remember this especially pre-facetime, pre iPhone4, when there was just the rear-facing camera. A few apps did implement this early on and were accepted, then later this behaviour was frowned upon, and expressly prohibited in the user guidelines (phrased something like “thou shall not use buttons for anything but their intended use”).
In fact, I implemented this feature for GPS Log but had to disable it in the official releases due to this reason.
And now, Apple has implemented this across the board.
Well it’s a good change. The old shutter button can be really hard to press sometimes if you’re trying to frame a particularly difficult shot, so it makes perfect sense. Also for self-portraits using the main camera. And I guess it’s their garden, and they can do whatever they want inside! It certainly pays us not to forget this.
Sina’s API is Down
Sina (China’s Twitter) has a public API like twitter does, and GPS Log integrates with it.
Sadly the API is down for maintenance until Monday (from at least 2 days ago). Terrible!
{“Request”: “/ statuses / upload.json”, “error_code”: “400″, “error”: “40070: Error: limited application access api!”}
Thread 1 (not speaking chinese, I had to express myself with emoticons…)
Official response (translated by google): “Sorry, in order to better service for everyone, to strengthen the management of applications, we are upgrading the platform, suspended some interface call is expected to end next Monday, I’m sorry to give us some inconvenience. Please continue to support us.” (不好意思,为了更好的为大家服务,加强对应用的管理,我们目前对平台进行升级,暂停了部分接口的调用,预计到下周一结束,非常抱歉给大家带来了不便.请大家继续支持我们.)
As far as I can gather, no third party Sina applications can post status updates for at least the last 3 days, and apparently for another 3. This is quite pathetic.
Facebook’s Application tabs going away
Update: I went to take a screenshot of my tab for this post, and it seems in the last hour the feature has been deprecated. :(
Last year, Facebook removed profile “boxes”. Replacing them were “Application Tabs” – the new way to customise your profile.
Personally I didn’t mind this change, the application tabs are much cleaner. It was a pity that the profile small sidebar boxes were removed, because this was a nice way to customise your profile seen by every visitor (I had a travel map there).
But now, Application Tabs too are going the way of the dodo.
Once this change has been applied, it will no longer be possible to customise your static Facebook profile, other than your list of “Likes”.
No more travel maps. No more lists of XBox achievements, or flair or whatever. Now I understand Facebook likes to keep it clean – but I think it’s nice to be able to customize your static profile one way or another.
This is also quite bad news for Application Developers like myself who have spent time creating rich tabs that users can display (in my case, a travel map).
Facebook claims that the feature was under-used. This may be true, but it still seems odd to remove the last remaining way to customise your static profile.
Creating a “Transparent” Logo Facebook Profile Pic
So I’m trying to sort out a logo for the Facebook ‘Page’ for GPS Log.
Facebook presents a few problems:
- you can’t have a transparent pic
- the background of the pic is not a plane color
- the thumbnail you create isn’t created from the full image, but a cropped version
Thus, you need to have a border of about 30% on the logo (for the thumbnail), and this border looks pretty bad against the background.
The bigger problem is that any hacks you do for the background (like trying to copy Facebook’s 2-color background) can bite you in the arse when creating the thumbnail (you don’t want this background for the thumbnail).
These guys solved it in a neat way (with 2 logos, one below for the thumbnail).
But I didn’t like the fact there were two logos, and the fact that apparently the background doesn’t line up perfectly in some browsers.
I have another plan. This one neatly solves both the 2-color background issue and the thumbanil. Firstly, make sure you have about a 30% border around your logo (so it will crop+shrink correctly for the thumbnail). Use a solid white background. Then add a 1px border with the color #d7e0e9 (the same color Facebook uses as it’s solid line between the 2 colors – update if nessesary).
Now your logo will fit nicely on the 2-color background (because of the border), and when the thumbnail is made, the border is conveniently cropped out. Check out the final result.
Now all this could be solved if Facebook just supported transparency, but I think it’s a neat solution until then.
GPS Log – the premier location tagging App for the iPhone 3G
Announcing GPS Log, a location logging, and tagging tool for the iPhone which lets you record the places you visit, complete with text, photos and tags – then enables you to revisit those locations later through the Maps app, and export all your data for viewing in Google Earth.
Check out all the details and videos at http://GPSLogApp.com
If you are interested, there is a free try-before-you-buy version (linked on that website), so give it a whirl and see if you like it!
If you do use it, please give me your honest feedback directly, or via the forums.
