It is with deep regret that I must tell you that two of our apps are no longer allowed to be called what they are about: Poirot and Miss Marple.
The copyright holders made it clear to me that both Poirot and Miss Marple are trademarks, and as such we’re not allowed to use them in our app titles. Hence we came up with two new titles that kind of vaguely describe what they do without actually saying what they are about:
The Belgian Detective Guide (new title for Poirot for iOS)
The Knitting Detective Guide (new title for Miss Marple for iOS)
Apple have approved both changes yesterday. The apps behaviour and layout has not changed, just the displayed title in iTunes and the App Store has.
Available immediately is the latest and greatest version of our Poirot App. Thanks to the wonderful folks at iCanLocalize and some substantial changes in the underlying data structure, we have implemented six additional languages:
Yesterday night Apple have approved our latest version of Poirot for iOS . This update contains the following features:
added iCloud Integration – FINALLY!
added iOS 7 UI (still compatible with iOS 5 and iOS 6)
added 64bit support on A7 processors (iPhone 5s, iPad Air, new iPad Mini)
beautified Detail View on 4″ Retina Displays (better spacing)
New iOS 7 UI
Check out the new look that the new iOS brings to the party:
On iOS 5+6 the app looks like it always has, we’ve made sure of that, so you’ll get the “retro look and feel”.
new iOS 7 interfacebeautified Detail View on 4″ devices
iCloud Integration
But the big news is iCloud: if you have our app installed on multiple devices, they can now sync seamlessly! Tick off an episode on your iPhone, and it’ll populate onto your iPad and iPod Touch in the background. You can see it happening live – it’s quite exciting.
I’ve added an option which lets you copy your current device data into iCloud. If you decline you can bring up the same dialogue from Settings later. Check out the new Settings Menu:
This wasn’t an easy undertaking, but I’m slowly coming to grips with the intricacies of iOS 7 and its developer tool Xcode 5. You can follow along what’s happening behind the scenes of hacking in my iOS Dev Diary.
It’s finally time for translations. Poirot stories are available in over 100 languages, and we want to support some of them. Even if it may not be feasible to translate every aspect of the app, we’d like to translate the story titles. This requires a complete re-write of the underlying data structure (read: a lot of work).
Earlier this year Julia and I have already started creating our own custom developer tools to support other languages, and now it’s time to merge those with the code advancements of Poirot. In fact, Julia was already busy adding most of the French titles this afternoon, and the code re-write is keeping me up at night (and going very well indeed).
Thank you for your continued support on Poirot for iOS!
