App Store notifications

with iOS 5 due for public release tomorrow (Oct-12) I guess the App Store reviewers will be working late today to clear the backlog from all of the iOS developers who have submitted iOS 5 app updates over the last week. I actually saw the status of an App go from “Waiting For Review” to “In Review” to “Processing for App Store” to “Ready for Sale” in just 40 minutes today.

This does make me wonder if Apple can turn around App reviews this quickly during the run up to a major release why can’t it always be this fast? Maybe they have more reviewers working this week or they are applying some lighter checks for simple updates? Of course not everybody is seeing such a quick response though Apple is claiming they have reviewed 99% of all new App and App Updates submitted in the last 7 days.

App Store Status Notifications

One quick tip if you don’t already have the iTunes Connect Mobile app installed go grab it today. It is a Universal app so it will work fine on both the iPhone and iPad. You need to login with your iTunes Connect Apple developer account. Whilst it does provide a pretty view of your App sales that is not why I recommend it. The main reason to use it is that it will deliver iOS notifications to your device any time the status of an App changes as it works it’s way through the App Store submission process. This saves a lot of trips and refreshes of the iTunes Connect web site to see if your App is in review yet.

iTunes 10.5

One final quick note. Apple has just posted the public version of iTunes 10.5. If you have been using one of the iTunes betas and are already tired of being warned it will expire you will want to download and install the official version from apple.com/itunes.

iTunes 10 Toolbar Buttons

The new iTunes 10 User Interface is creating a lot of discussion both from Users and Cocoa developers. Whenever a program as familiar as iTunes is changed it always generates a big reaction (both positive and negative). My instinct is always to give it a week or two before reacting to see if the change grows on me with use. The change that certainly made me do a double take is the change to the toolbar with the close/minimise/maximise buttons rotated from a horizontal to a vertical layout. The title bar which previously just said “iTunes” has also disappeared.

As well as mimicking the layout of the buttons in the iTunes mini player this layout seems to have been done to save space in the iTunes toolbar. There is some debate as to whether this is a violation of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). Certainly the HIG does say that all windows should have a title bar. It does not say if the close/minimise/maximise buttons should be arranged horizontally or vertically. All the examples in the HIG show the buttons arranged horizontally and that seems to be the way that most Cocoa apps do it with the possible exception of the iTunes mini player.

Anyway I will leave it to the HIG gurus to argue the pros and cons. I do suggest you give it a week but if after that it still annoys you there is a simple way to revert to the old style. Quit iTunes and then from a terminal window:

$ defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -boolean YES

Restart iTunes and you will be back to the familiar toolbar and title bar layout:

If you want to get back to the iTunes 10 default layout as Steve intended:

$ defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -boolean NO

(Tip of the hat to the cult-of-mac blog for the original tip)

This copy of iTunes will expire

Not a big deal but running iTunes this morning gives me the messages that “This copy of iTunes will expire in 111 hours”. So it seems missing wallpaper is not the only side-effect of running the GM releases of iOS and iTunes 9.2.

I don’t remember coming across this issue with GM builds of iTunes in the past? A download and reinstall of the current version from Apple seems to have quickly fixed the issue.

Missing wallpapers when using iOS4 GM build

I realised today that the 3rd Gen iPod Touch that I used to install iOS4 was missing the wallpapers. I could set the wallpaper to a photo of my choice but none of the default Apple wallpapers were showing up under Settings -> Wallpaper.

It seems that this happens if you used the iOS 4 GM image released to developers a few weeks ahead of the actual public release. The fix is to force an update via iTunes. To do this you first need to download the correct version of the OS image for the device. TUAW has links to the relevant Apple URLs for this.

Then with your device connected Alt-click the Check for Update button in iTunes and choose the image you just downloaded. After iTunes has finished you should have all of the default wallpapers back.