David Nicholson: Apple releases iOS 7.1 beta 3 with multiple interface tweaks

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Apple releases iOS 7.1 beta 3 with multiple interface tweaks

The third beta of iOS 7.1 is now available to developers, bringing with it numerous interface tweaks and improvements.*

Circles seem to be the flavor in the latest beta – Apple has tweaked the interface for the phone app and added circular buttons to the dialer, incoming call, and*call-in-progress screens. The power button in the power off*UI has also been made circular, and sliding it to the right will now dim the screen progressively. Other interface tweaks include an option to turn off motion effects right in the wallpaper selection menu, darker icons for the*Phone, Messages, and FaceTime apps, updated Repeat and Shuffle buttons, a bolder keyboard, and a few changes to text in apps like Safari.

In addition to the plethora of interface tweaks (some of which will likely be reversed or further tweaked before iOS 7.1 rolls out to consumers), beta 3 includes fixes for issues related to setting up a new iCloud account, problems with playing audiobooks in the Music app, and a few developer-centric bugs; the latest build also introduces a few issues, including one that could make iMessages fail to send upon the first try.

Here’s Apple’s official changelog:

Notes and Known Issues

The following issues relate to using iOS SDK 7.1 beta 3 to develop code.

Bluetooth

Known Issue

32-bit apps running on a 64-bit device cannot attach to BTServer.

CFNetwork

Notes

A compatibility behavior has been added to address an issue where some web servers would send the wrong Content-Length value for “Content-Encoding: gzip” content. Previously,*NSURLConnection*and*NSURLSession*would send a “network connection was lost” / NSURLErrorNetworkConnectionLost (-1005) error in this situation.

The compatibility behavior applies only if the Content-Length value exactly matches the expanded gzip’d content. It won’t apply for “off by 1” or similar miscounting.

iCloud

Fixed in iOS 7.1 beta 3

Creating a new iCloud account during setup assistant, should no longer give you an error when you enable iCloud Keychain.

Messages

Known Issue

Messages sometimes indicates iMessage send failure immediately after sending.

Workaround:Tap the error icon to re-send the message.

Music App

Fixed in iOS 7.1 beta 3

Audiobooks now play as expected.

Safari

Notes

A property,*minimal-ui, has been added for the viewport meta tag key that allows minimizing the top and bottom bars on the iPhone as the page loads. While on a page using*minimal-ui, tapping the top bar brings the bars back. Tapping back in the content dismisses them again.

For example, use*<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=1024, minimal-ui”>.

UIKit

Known Issues

If a*UITextField*or a*UILabel*that is baseline aligned with constraints has attributes that change after the constraints have been added, the layout may be incorrect. The exception to this is*-setFont:*on*UILabel, which should work as expected.Workaround:*Avoid making changes in*UITextField*or*UILabel*after adding baseline-alignment constraints. If you must make changes, you should remove the constraints and then reapply them afterward. Note that this is a performance hit, so don’t do it unless it is necessary.

The*backIndicatorTransitionMask*from a storyboard or a xib will not be interpreted correctly at runtime.Workaround:*Set the*backIndicatorTransitionMask*in code.