We’ve just submitted Folio 1.2.2 to Apple for review. It primarily addresses the crashing issue when opening single-page PDFs on iOS 4 devices. We know there are other issues, but this was a big one.

For your Thanksgiving week PDF reading pleasure, have a new Folio release. This is a minor bugfix release that addresses the following issues in 1.2:

• Renaming files now uses the currently displayed name for the file (either the file name or the document’s title, if available)
• Folio now remembers your location in the document browser even after being forced to exit while in the background
• Avoid adding directories to the document library as if they were PDF documents
• Fix a crash when importing documents from other applications
• Adds retina versions of the magnifying loupe for selecting text
• Uses a dark background for un-rendered pages in inverted display modes

As always, snag it on the App Store.

We’re pleased to announce the release of Folio 1.2 to the App Store. As outlined in our previous post, this release adds text highlighting, document renaming, and printing support.

Good news, everyone!

We’ve submitted Folio 1.2 to Apple for review, and hope to see it available in the App Store any day now. Folio 1.2 brings with it a number of enhancements and bugfixes, but the most notable are:

• Highlight document text
• Rename documents in the document browser by tapping the name

We’ve also added names to bookmarks and the ability to e-mail documents from the iPhone. Most of the other changes are performance and stability improvements. If you’re curious about the gory details, we’ll be happy to tell you. Feel free to e-mail us.

Hello everyone. As some of you know, we said Folio 1.2 would by out by the end of September. We’re going to miss that deadline by a few days, but we wanted to make sure you know we’re still hard at work on Folio 1.2. We hate missing deadlines as much as anyone, but it’s important to us to deliver a high quality product and Folio 1.2 isn’t quite ready yet.

The next release of Folio brings with it exciting new features and a host of stability improvements. We’ll be posting a video with a brief tour of the new features shortly after we submit it Apple for review. Look out for this within the next few days.

Again, we apologize for the delay. We look forward to making a release announcement soon!

We’re sorry for all of the update traffic; we promise it will slow down soon. Folio 1.1.2, which corrects the “dump my entire library and re-add it” bug, is now available on the App Store. There are a couple of other bugfixes in this release, and we’re planning on considering it stable until 1.2 unless something particularly nasty crops up.

Just a tiny minor update, but an important one. This update makes the internal browser auto-scale web pages, but more importantly it brings a marked improvement to the sharpness of rendered pages.

Find out more about Folio on our website, or check it out on the App Store.

Update: We’ve realized that our updates to date have contained a bug where an upgrade from the store they cause the user’s library to be re-indexed. As a result we are recommending users who have version prior to 1.1.1 delay upgrading until 1.1.2 is released. We expect this to happen sometime later this week. It corrects this and several other issues.

We apologize for the inconvenience. For those curious about what went wrong: upgrading from the store behaves differently than upgrading using the development tools. We have now found a method which duplicates the store upgrade experience, so we should be able to avoid this sort of bug in the future.

Folio 1.1 is now available for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Find it on the App Store.

If you’re curious about what Folio can do, we’ve just finished a rough cut of our iPad screencast. See what Folio can do:

On the subject of updates, we’re sorry there hasn’t been one for Folio recently.

A bit over a week ago we submitted Folio 1.0.2 to Apple for review. As this release contained only minor bugfixes, we expected that it would be approved in short order. It turns out we were being optimistic. Eight days after we submitted we received this friendly note from Apple:

Hello Jon,

Thank you for submitting Folio ~ The PDF Reader to the App Store.

We have reviewed your iPad application, but cannot post this version to the App Store because we found more than one popover element visible onscreen at a time. We have included some additional details below to help explain the issue and hope you’ll consider revising and resubmitting your application.

When the user selects Import and the Search button on the Library screen, the application displays multiple popovers on the screen at one time. Please refer to the attached screenshots.

For more information, please review the iPad UI Element Guidelines section of the iPad’s Human Interface Guideline:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/General/Conceptual/iPadHIG/iPadHIG.pdf

For discrete code-level questions, you may opt to consult with Apple Developer Technical Support at http://developer.apple.com/support/resources/technicalsupport/. To ensure that Developer Technical Support can best help you, please be sure to include any logs, screenshots, or steps to reproduce the issues you’ve encountered.

If you have any questions about this response, or would like to discuss it further, please feel free to reply to this email. We look forward to reviewing your revised app.

Sincerely,

App Review Team

This is perfectly legitimate rejection. We have a bug that causes us to violate the Human Interface Guidelines. Moreover, it really does look awful:

That being said, the bug has been there since 1.0 (escaping the notice of both Apple and we here at Ballistic Pigeon), and the situation would not have been made any worse by approving this release. The App Store approval process is not really set up for that, though, so we’ll work with what we’ve got. As it stands, Folio 1.1 is almost ready and should be submitted to Apple today. We’ve fixed the issue in question, and hope that Apple will approve this version soon.

We apologize to any of our customers that have been inconvenienced by this, and we hope you’ll be very happy with Folio 1.1 when it hits the store.

Welcome to the Ballistic Pigeon blog. Our goal is to primarily post new product and update announcements, but expect to see a little news now and then between updates.

We’re going to try to keep the opinion posts to a minimum, although we’ll probably do the occasional “numbers” post as we think those are beneficial to the iOS development community at large.

If you’re interested in what’s going on with the Ballistic Pigeon staff you can find Jon and Erik on Twitter. You can also check out Jon’s personal blog.