Today I am proud to announce that BabyGrow 2.6.1 is now available! Outwardly, this is the “iOS 7” update, fixing a number of issues on iOS 7 and updating the UI to fit a little better with Apple’s new design vision. The entry editor has also been improved, adding support for copy and paste and other niceties. And, of course, I fixed a number of known bugs.
Under the hood, BabyGrow has been thoroughly modernized. The majority of the UI has been reworked to take advantage of storyboards and auto layout. A lot of dead code from much earlier versions has been removed. Much code has been reworked to take full advantage of the modern Objective-C runtime. These changes won’t make a huge difference for BabyGrow’s users, but they are important nonetheless. Less of my time will be spent dealing with outdated techniques, workarounds for very old versions of iOS, and so on.
These under-the-hood changes are so significant, from my perspective, that I was very tempted to call this BabyGrow 3. It definitely has the feel of a major new version to me. However, most of that will never be seen by users of the app, and outwardly this is a pretty incremental update. Therefore, I decided to stick with just bumping the minor version number.
So, why 2.6.1 and not 2.6? Well, 2.6 was actually available for several hours yesterday. There was nothing actually wrong with 2.6 itself, but I forgot to upload the updated icon to iTunes Connect when submitting the app update. I didn’t notice this oversight until 2.6 became available yesterday morning. Unfortunately, you cannot update the App Store icon (or the screenshots, for that matter) once the update has entered review. The only way to update the icon is to submit a new binary, which is just what I did. Aside from the version number, 2.6.1 is identical to 2.6. It is only the App Store metadata that changed.
When I realized my mistake, I fully expected the App Store would continue showing the older version of the icon until after Apple’s holiday break that starts this weekend. That wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but I wasn’t too happy about it. Fortunately someone on the App Store review team apparently took pity on me and moved the update through the review process in less than a day. I should note that I did not request an expedited review. I did mention in the review notes that only the App Store metadata had changed. At any rate, whoever made that happen, I really appreciate it!
If you’ve got an iPhone and you’ve got a little one whose growth you’d like to track, go get it!