It’s designed for iOS 5, and uses ARC. It supports Retina and non-Retina devices, and works with VoiceOver. MGTileMenu is designed for use on iPad, but it will also work on iPhone and iPod touch.

“Shells apps promise to let you share a single implementation across several platforms. In practice, they trade several straightforward implementations for a single complex implementation.”

— Benjamin Sandofsky, in Shell Apps and Silver Bullets

Interfaces exist to enable interaction between humans and our world. They can help clarify, illuminate, enable, show relationships, bring us together, pull us apart, manage our expectations, and give us access to services. The act of designing interfaces is not art and they are not monuments unto themselves. Interfaces do a job and their effectiveness can be measured. They are not just utilitarian, however. The best interfaces can inspire, evoke, mystify, and intensify our relationship with the world.

Great read, and spot on in most cases.

People aren’t very good at media multitasking – like reading a book while watching TV – but do it anyway because it makes them feel good, a new study suggests.

— Jeff Grabmeier, in Multitasking May Hurt Your Performance, But It Makes You Feel Better

This article presents the mechanisms of type rendering, how they were developed, and how and why they are applied by the various operating systems and browsers—so that when it comes time to choose a font for your next project, you know what to look out for to ensure the quality of the typography is consistently high.

Screenshot Journal is an iOS app that solves this in a beautiful way. It finds and imports all the screenshots on your device, and let’s you zoom in and view the actual pixels without any anti-alias applied. Here’s a zoomed in screenshot in Photos:

And here’s the same zoomed in screenshot viewed in Screenshot Journal:

It’s a huge time saver, and it will surely help to increase the headache of developers that you’re working with (as you can nag them even more about misaligned pixels). It’s $1.99 on the App Store, and it’s available for both iPhone and iPad.

[via Neven Mrgan]

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 x 114 gives 20, which is the proper radius for a 114px icon).

And for the lazy ones, he listed the calculations for the most common icons:

• Icon512.png – 512px – 89.825
• Icon.png – 57px – 10
• Icon@2x.png – 114px – 20
• Icon-72.png – 72px – 12.632
• Icon-72@2x.png – 144px – 25.263
• Icon-Small.png – 29px – 5.088
• Icon-Small@2x.png – 58px – 10.175