Blog post on Simulator Status Magic and update to the old post with a new link.

Author: Dave Verwer

_posts/2014-09-15-status-magic-and-iphone6-screen-sizes.md

@@ -7,6 +7,10 @@ excerpt: Last week Apple unveiled some beautiful new devices in the form of the
 
 ![Sherlocked](http://shinydev.s3.amazonaws.com/blog-files/status-magic-sherlocked.png)
 
+**UPDATE: We have released a small open source tool to help capture perfect screen shots if you use the iOS Simulator to capture your screenshots. [Read all about it](http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/status-magic-for-the-ios-simulator/).**
+
+—
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 Last week Apple unveiled some beautiful new devices in the form of the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. As you surely know by now the new devices have new screen resolutions as well, 1334x750 pixels for the iPhone 6 and a whopping 1920x1080 pixels for the 6 Plus.
 
 More fundamental than the resolution change is the fact that the iPhone Plus renders at a new scale factor. Native rendering, including screenshots needed for App Store listings is now 3x resolution instead of 2x, the device then [scales down the output](http://www.paintcodeapp.com/news/iphone-6-screens-demystified) to the 1920x1080px hardware.
@@ -49,3 +53,7 @@ If it had been a matter of updating Status Magic to simply accept and render out
 However, the 3x rendering issue is a much bigger problem. The code involved in getting everything in a perfect position between 1x and 2x was bad enough (oh how I wish it was a simple as just multiplying by 2 😝) and doing all those tweaks again for 3x is simply not worth the effort given that the operating system has a better way to achieve the same result, combined with the fact that Apple are now recommending that status bars be snipped.
 
 I loved this app, it wasn't useful every day but it really made a difference to App Store screenshots and every time I saw a 9:41 on an App Store screenshot I wondered if we had helped create it. Farewell, Status Magic!
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+**UPDATE: We have released a small open source tool to help capture perfect screen shots if you use the iOS Simulator to capture your screenshots. [Read all about it](http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/status-magic-for-the-ios-simulator/).**

_posts/2014-10-07-status-magic-for-the-ios-simulator.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: Status Magic for the iOS Simulator
+author: Dave Verwer
+excerpt: After we removed Status Magic from the App Store quite a few people contacted us and explained that they either did not have access to the new devices or that the main way that they took screenshots was on the iOS Simulator. So, we had a think about what we could do to help and came up with a solution which solves both of those issues.
+---
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+A couple of weeks ago we made the sad decision to [stop development of Status Magic and remove it from the Mac App Store](http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/status-magic-and-iphone6-screen-sizes/).
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+Quite a few people contacted us and explained that they either did not have access to the new devices or that the primary way that they took screenshots was on the iOS Simulator. So, we had a think about what we could do to help and came up with a solution which we think solves both of those issues.
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+Back when iOS 7 was first released we discovered some new (private) APIs which allowed permanent modification of the status bar. These APIs allow permanent overrides for things like the current time, signal strength, WiFi bars and battery state. We experimented a bit with these APIs when iOS 7 was released but it wasn’t practical to use on real devices and so we abandoned the experiments. However, now that [taking perfect screenshots on a real device is easy](http://shinydevelopment.com/blog/status-magic-and-iphone6-screen-sizes/), it seemed a good chance to put that experimentation into something that could be used to make it just as easy on the iOS Simulator.
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+![Simulator Status Magic](http://shinydev.s3.amazonaws.com/blog-files/simulator-status-magic.png)
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+We’ve put together and released a small open source app which overrides the iOS Simulator status bar to match the settings of the status bars used in the [Apple marketing materials](http://www.apple.com/ios/).
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+Using it is as easy as [downloading the app](https://github.com/shinydevelopment/SimulatorStatusMagic), installing it on your iOS Simulator and pressing a single button.  Could it be any easier? :)
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+You can find [Simulator Status Magic on GitHub](https://github.com/shinydevelopment/SimulatorStatusMagic). Please give it a try and let us know if it’s useful.