woot! released version 1.17 of Sketch Club this past month! \o/

it was refreshing doing a bunch of native UI with this update. most of the community stuff has been web based with UIWebView and that’s definitely nice for fluid layouts and such but it’s rather slow and dealing with three languages (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) is a headache. that’s in comparison to native using just one language (Objective C) and getting nice fast hardware accelerated views and animations. maybe doing UI in HTML canvas could be a good way to do things in the future instead of wrangling silly markup and styles but at that point the Objective C APIs are again much better, run faster, and have better tools supporting them…

another thing that was quite nice is that the App Store review times have gotten really short!! it used to always take five to seven days for an update to get reviewed and approved but now updates are flying through in under a day each! soooooo much nicer!! some things about the App Store have gotten worse though. previously doing an update would reset the ratings and reviews, but would show total ratings across all versions of the app for a couple days. that actually provided a nice boost in sales before dropping as the ratings reset. now it seems to reset to 0 immediately so sales are squashed until enough people start rating the new version. iOS6 also removed the section that displayed new and newly updated apps so you don’t get that boost from updates anymore either. oh well i hope they improve this stuff with iOS7!

new native ui
new ui for fast commenting and rating