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I know that there are plenty of other task manager apps out there, free ones even, that have had cloud syncing for a while now. I’ve tried them all, but nothing works as well for me as Things,and now Things 2 finally has proper syncing. Not too minimal, not heavily laden with features, just the right amount of functionality to manage tasks, without spending managing the task-manager.

Well done Cultured Code, it was worth the wait!

Sorry its taken a while to get around to this, but I’ve finally updated the iOS Application Icon Template for Illustrator to include the new Retina sizes for iPad 3:

Part of the delay was me trying to include all the document icon sizes as well, but these were more complicated, and I’ll do a seperate template for these when I can. The update includes the whopping 1024px size required for the App Store on iPad 3.

I’ve not updated the guides and masks layer to use the super-accurate corner radius. As before, treat this layer just for preview, and hide it before exporting to PNGs. Your exported file should have sharp, not rounded, corners. I recommend using Matthew Ericson’s export script to export the artboards to PNGs. The artboards are labelled following the Apple guidelines, so as long as you don’t add a prefix or suffix, the filename should be right!

⬇ Download the Template

There shouldn’t be any catastrophic errors, but if you notice anything odd, please let me know!

When designing app icons for iOS it’s useful to know the corner radius for each size to preview it correctly – even though the exported png needs to have sharp corners. This is why I include the radius size on the Icon Reference Chart and a mask layer on the OS Illustrator Template.

These sizes are rounded up to the nearest pixel though, and when David Barnard of AppCubby consulted Louie Mantia (former Apple, Square, and Iconfactory designer) he found the true sizes:

Apple starts with the 57px icon and a radius of 10 then scales up or down from there. Thus you can calculate the radius for any icon size using 10/57 x new size (for example 10/57 × 114 gives 20, which is the proper radius for a 114px icon). Here is a list of the most commonly used icons, proper naming conventions, pixel dimensions, and corner radii.

This means that the correct radius measurements are as follows:

If your design doesn’t have any visual elements that follow or echo the corner radius, then you can safely ignore these measurements, and I would normally do just that. Occasionally though, you may find that the right solution requires it, and therefore the more accurate may be useful. Icons like Camera Genius use the corner radius as part of the design:

Obviously, at a pixel level, the difference really is minute, but may be just enough to make it feel as if it’s not sitting right:

Compare the 2 corners in this image, and you can see that it is different. I created this in Illustrator, which does allow you to use radii with a decimal point – your mileage in other apps may vary. For now I’m not sure if adding these to the Icon Handbooks iOS Reference Chart is over-complicating matters – I’d love to know your thoughts via Twitter!

My friend Simon at Goo Software recently needed to open a zip file on his iPhone, view it contents and send one of the files to someone else. A simple task you would think, but upon finding that there were no decent solutions available on the App Store, he did what any self-respecting iOS developer would do – made one himself!

The result is Zippity, the easiest way to handle zip files on your iPhone!
Preview contents, send via email, open in other apps on your iPhone. For a mere 69p it also supports .tar, .tar.gz, .gz as well as .zip.

Buy Zippity on the App Store