It was all the way back at WWDC 2014 that my friend Hans vershooten suggested what eventually became the marquis feature of x2y 4.0: Percentages. x2y has always been able to calculate x or y dimensions for you automatically. It would be nice, Hans suggested, if it could also tell you the percentage difference between the original image and the new one. So if you want, for instance, a rectangle that’s exactly 245% of the original, x2y should be able to calculate both the x and y dimensions…

Today, I’m releasing version 3.0 of x2y, my aspect ratio calculator for iOS. As I’ve said before, I want to continually find ways to improve this app, as it’s something I use regularly myself. When I first started with this next version, I had only intended to add theme support, as a fun way to change up the colors of the interface for those who didn’t necessarily like the default dark appearance. As I worked on the themes, though, I thought of other features that…

One thing that has bugged me since I got my first 4-inch iPhone is the “thumb gymnastics” involved whenever I need to reach a control that’s near the top of the screen. You know what I mean. Holding the phone one-handed, touching controls with my thumb, I can reach the top left and right corners of the screen for those navigation bar controls, but it’s not exactly comfortable. I can’t fix this issue for every app on my phone of course, but for my own apps at…

Riccardo Mori » My essential iOS apps — Part 1: “This article may disappoint some people. It doesn’t want to be an in-depth guide to ‘The 30 best iOS apps you must have on your iPhone or iPad’. It’s not going to be another piece along the lines of ‘The best iOS apps introduced in 2013″ or ‘iOS apps that everybody must have’. Instead I wanted to focus on a selection of apps that have proven to be indispensable to me over the years, making this article more akin to…

One thing that I wanted to be certain didn’t happen when I started working on Fin was the neglecting my first app, x2y. While x2y has a great feature set and just this summer received a UI overhaul for iOS 7, I nevertheless don’t see it as “done” by any means. There are always things you can add and other ways to improve any piece of software. With this in mind, right after the Fin 1.0 release, I went to work on a small update to x2y:…