TapLynx

TapLynx 1.2 has been released. It is, as always, free to download and try out.

Changes in 1.2:

Performance — it’s faster and uses less memory. This is probably the last release for a while to focus heavily on performance. It’s important to get that foundation done: now we can build on it. One of the performance changes makes things faster for feeds that don’t support conditional GET. (But please please please use conditional GET.)

You can now use Flurry analytics. Documentation is here.

You can use Medialets analytics. Documentation is here.

You can set up system-authenticated feeds (but not per-used authenticated feeds, which I know some people still want). Documentation is here.

You no longer need to include Feeds.sqlite3 in your apps. TapLynx creates it automatically. (No harm if you forget and do include it: it’ll just be ignored.)

Fixed a bug where an updated feed would sometimes not show the updates until the next launch.

Fixed a couple very small memory leaks.

Fixed a crashing bug with BCResourceWebViewController (or other custom view controller) when a navbar background image was specified.

The thumbnail finder handles the weird case where a return or linefeed appears after an opening <img tag (instead of the space character you’d normally expect).

TapLynx 1.1.2 includes a few changes:

- A couple crashing bugs were fixed. One could happen with iPhone apps that use sub-folders; the other could happen if a news item is updated at the same time it’s being drawn in a list view.

- Several more performance enhancements were added, though they’re likely to be noticed only with apps with lots of feeds.

- Feeds are now downloaded from left to right, which makes sense as the leftmost-tab is usually the most important.

As always, TapLynx is free to download and try out.

We’ve been so pleased at the response to TapLynx — lots of people are using it to build iPhone apps. Today we’re happy to announce a new version and a new price.

First, the price: a TapLynx license is now $599, down from $3,499. We made this change in part because we’d had lots of people asking about pricing for non-profits and indie developers and in part because our recent developer survey taught us more about how contractors charge for building iPhone apps.

But the main thing was that we just want even more people to be able to use it. We think TapLynx is cool.

It remains free, as always, to download the SDK and try it out. You can run apps in the simulator and on an iPhone or iPod Touch — you don’t have to pay until you want to upload to the App Store.

About this new release

TapLynx 1.1 is all about performance. It’s faster and more efficient. The parts of the app that do the most work — downloading, parsing, storing news in the database, making thumbnails, caching images — have been rewritten and optimized.

It’s a smarter TapLynx under the hood.

Though there are plenty of other feature requests, lots of things we want to add, performance is something everybody could use, so we did that first.

We also made a small change to the watermark to make it easier to demo apps to potential clients: the watermark now appears a maximum of four times per app run. (The watermark appears only for non-licensed apps, apps running in demo mode.) We made this change to make it easier for TapLynx users to succeed.

That’s the scoop. You can download it for free and check it out. If you have any questions or feedback, let us know. And don’t forget you can follow TapLynx on Twitter.