I finally got around to filing a Radar against the Mono Audio iOS Accessibility setting. It just sums the left and right channels, but doesn’t scale by 6dB, so you can clip the output: rdar://34616660

Farewell, 32-bit Apps

iOS 11 is the 32-bit Appocalypse. Before pulling the trigger on the update, I took a look at the apps on my phone that won’t survive the transition1:

  • Star Wars: Tiny Death Star: This was a really fun game; a Star Wars-themed re-skin of Tiny Tower. It was only supported for a year, and received its last update back in 2014. I’ll miss it, but Tiny Tower is still going strong if I want a fix.
  • Chesspuzzles: According to my iTunes Purchase History, I downloaded this on November 1, 2008. It was made by Eric Peng, but I can’t find any information about it now. It was never updated for Retina or 4” screens, let alone iOS 7. The Chess.com app is filling this need for me these days.
  • Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition: I think this was the only version of Monopoly available on iOS when I bought it back in February of 2009. Macworld gave it four mice. Someone thought to preserve the gameplay for posterity. The next time I have a Monopoly craving, I’ll spring for this version instead.
  • Super MAMC: This is still up on the store, as of this writing, but the last update it received was back in 2012. I think I first heard of this game from Brett Terpstra on his Systematic Podcast, before he jumped from 5by5. I’m glad the Apple Watch didn’t exist the last time I played this; I’d be terrified to see what it did to my heart rate. You can see the gameplay here.
  • Words HD Free: Letterpress filled the void Words With Friends left for me years ago. Good riddance.
  • UE SPL: This was a basic SPL meter. I haven’t needed a replacement yet, and I never even bothered to verify the accuracy of this one.
  • MusicConv: This was a basic Frequency to Note Name to Midi Number calculator. It was really useful for some projects years ago, but it doesn’t even seem to launch on iOS 10.
  • Canopener: This is a great standalone music player, with some simple spatialization algorithms. GoodHertz still sells an AU and AAX plugin with the same spatial processing.
  • Nord Beat 2: A MIDI step sequencer, last updated in 2014. I was mostly using it for drums, and apps like Elastic Drums had replaced it for me.
  • CanIStream.it: This service used to be the best way to see what shows and movies were on each streaming service, but JustWatch is now providing this service for me.
  • TaskPaper for iOS: Jesse Grosjean stopped supporting this app four years ago. Now I use Editorial for most of my iOS TaskPaper needs.

Thank you for your service. I’m sorry I can’t take you into the future with me; you’ll be missed.

  1. You can see this for yourself by heading to Settings ➡️ General ➡️ About ➡️ Applications. ↩

With the native Twitter API dead in iOS 11, I’m switch my microblog posting Workflow.app workflow to use the Tweetbot Tweet Action… this is the first test.