I recently had the good fortune to work with our extremely talented lead app developer on upgrading some UI elements for users that weren’t having the best possible experience with our app on the Retina Display. Having researched some different blog posts on the matter and surveying our image collection, I quickly realized that I would be creating a lot of the images from scratch. In order to reduce the work-effort necessary for any future display changes, I would re-create all the new icons in vector format (something that we should have done in the first place, but team time constraints tend to have those effects).

Let the games begin!

One might assume that this endeavor would be rather straightforward.

• Open up Illustrator
• Create the required images in vector format
• Find the size of the existing image and multiply the height and width by 2
• ‘Save As’
• Go grab a beverage and call it a day

Unfortunately, as with many things in life, this wasn’t as straightforward as initially believed. It is true that if we had developed a native application, we could have created the new images and placed a ‘@2x’ within the image name (e.g. fooBar.png would become fooBar@2x.png – Apple has a nice little paragraph here on automating image replacement with naming conventions). But our reasons for creating a web application are well documented, and the ‘extra’ work required to get the new hi-res images in place was well worth the effort considering the freedom we achieved by not dealing with the App Store. After the jump, I’ll attempt to walk you through our process and highlight some findings to hopefully save other developers some time.
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Hot on the heels of Google announcing that Google Voice is now open for everyone we have just released a new version of VoiceCentral Black Swan.  The latest release is version 1.2.0 and has a bunch of features and fixes included.

Here are some of the new features to look out for:

1. Premium feature: Mark a phone number as SPAM
2. Premium feature: Block a phone number
3. Premium feature: Ability to forward an SMS message (tap and hold)
4. Direct Outbound dialing for iPhone users (user optional)
5. Voicemail transcription preview
6. Launch directly to Favorites
7. Auto-update of SMS conversation list
8. Setting to toggle SMS auto-correction
9. Toggle Favorite status from call/voicemail details
10. Allow users to hide status messages
11. User-selectable date format
12. Select callback number per call

We have also incorporated many fixes and performance improvements.  Many of these come from our wonderful users so keep up all the feedback!

While we look forward to adding even more new features in the near future, we hope you enjoy this new release!

Side note: It is so very nice to have a managed release on our schedule and not the whim of a faceless App Store review team.  Wish they would fix that aspect of the App Store!

We are seeing an issue playing voicemails in Black Swan for certain users.  It seems that Google changed the access parameters.  We are working on a fix and will have it updated as soon as possible.

Stay tuned for more…

Many of you already know this but a couple of weeks ago we released a significant update to Black Swan.  The user response over the last two weeks has been tremendous and we’d like to spread the word on the improvements to those who hadn’t heard.  Along with several performance improvements and general fixes we have added some additional features:

• iPad Compatibility.  This will be an ongoing effort to make the experience on the iPad completely unique and better able to leverage the screen real estate but for this release our immediate goal was to have feature parity with the iPhone version.
• Many improvements for people with long contact lists
• Management of both callback numbers and forwarding numbers.
• Support for multiple Google Voice accounts (this was a much requested feature)
• Copy/Paste support in the keypad
• Inbox Search
• Option to enter a default area code
• Optional Default Startup screen
• Option to disable the “Please answer the call” prompt
• Prowl/Growl support for SMS push notification compatibility

We are constantly working on improvements to the platform, so keep your great ideas coming. And if you haven’t already go check out the new release of VoiceCentral Black Swan.  See the differences between free and premium here.

Didn’t fully try to debug his one, so I’ll tell you what I know. My iPhone was running hot for a couple of days and wouldn’t hold a charge. Rebooting and restoring had no effect. I noticed that my iPhone Exchange account showed extra messages that didn’t appear in Apple Mail. The “extra” messages on my iPhone were messages that a client had tried to recall (I’m still amazed when people try to recall messages. For some reason, it brings back memories of cc:Mail.)

I deleted my Exchange account from my phone and setup again. My iPhone Exchange inbox still had the recalled messages, so I deleted the recalled messages. Things look good now. Not sure what did the trick, but I think it was simply deleting the recalled messages.