I got a lot of positive feedback to my recent article about iOS version statistics. I thought I’d go a step farther and expand the results to include Audiobooks, in addition to My Recipe Book. Audiobooks provides data for both iPhone and iPad. Furthermore, the free version of Audiobooks has around 100k weekly downloads so provides a much wider sample set. The data below represents the last week of usage.

This morning Apple surprised the developer community with the announcement and developer preview release of the next version of OS X, Mountain Lion. This OS will bring a large number of iOS-like features to the Mac and generally create more customer experience consistency between the two platforms. Here are my initial reactions to what this announcements means for developers:

The question of when to drop support for older operating systems is always a bit tricky. An app creator wants to balance the dual goals of customer and developer happiness. Support for older devices can serve as an anchor to development holding back adoption of new features or capabilities.

I’m starting work on a major upgrade to My Recipe Book, my iPad app for organizing and managing your recipe collection. As part of my planning process I set out to determine what OS version I could safely limit myself to. My Recipe Book reports some basic analytics so I pulled them into Excel and run the numbers.

The recent controversy regarding address book data in iOS got me thinking about how difficult it is for developers to take reasonable steps to protect user data. If it posed a significant developmental challenge then it would at least be understandable, though still inexcusable, for app makers to ignore best-practices.

I have a number of friends who are having their first child in the near future. This got me thinking about the things I have found useful in parenting my own two children that no parenting book, blog or TV show ever mentioned. These are things that have helped make raising young children just that little bit easier.

It is now widely accepted that Apple will be releasing a new iPad early in March. It is expected this will include a Retina display like the iPhone. This would have a resolution of 2048x1536 (double its current resolution of 1024x768). I find numbers like that often hard to visualize so I did a quick graph comparing that to current Apple displays. A screen that size would be 96 pixels taller than a 27” iMac or Thunderbolt Display in landscape and 608 pixels taller in portrait.

Following up on my article about how privacy works on iOS, I thought it helpful to also give a more opinionated post discussing privacy. I’ll focus on the security of the address book since that is the topic du jour, but these concepts apply more generally as well.

The social sharing app Path found itself in a bit of hot water today as it was reported that they were uploading user’s address book data to their servers without user opt-in. This behavior is clearly in violation of both user trust and App Store policies.

The incident got me thinking about how privacy is managed on iOS and more universally. Generally speaking there are five ways that an OS vendor can ensure the privacy of user data.

As linked up on Daring Fireball, the point-and-shoot market is in decline. This makes sense, people are either taking pictures using their cellphones or a dSLR. The former for convenience and the later for quality. The middle ground that the point-and-shoot camera used to serve just doesn’t make sense any more now that cellphone cameras have gotten good enough.

After a back and forth Twitter discussion yesterday with David Barnard about how Japanese tax withholding works in the the App Store I figured I’d write a quick post to clarify how it works. I am neither an accountant nor a lawyer, so it is a good idea to contact one of those before making any major decisions on this topic. This is also written entirely from a US perspective. I have no idea how things work around the world.

In a Nutshell: The Japanese government requires that Apple withhold 20% of your profits from App Store sales unless you have filed forms demonstrating that you are a foreign company and taxable there instead. The forms are a bit complex and the process a bit cumbersome, but unless you complete it 20% of whatever you make in Japan is taken and not returned.