Before I slate the app I want to make it clear that the official F1 iPhone app is a technical wonder. It streams live data from all the practice, qualifying and race sessions direct to the iPhone. You can view the split times and track all the cars on the map. It’s kind of how I imagined the future would be. I bought the app before the 2010 season began and for most of the races it sat in its dock on my desk so I could glance up at the leader boards while working on my laptop. It was the best app on my iPhone until…

..the 2010 Silverstone F1 Grand Prix. This is where I needed the app most and it failed me. Here’s the problem. If you don’t get to a Grand Prix early enough you don’t get to sit in front of one of those nice big tellys that shows you the race positions. I didn’t think I needed to worry as I had my trusty F1 app with me. However, during the race I couldn’t get the app to connect to the live data stream. I had an Edge data connection and other web-enabled apps, such as Twitter, worked fine. The problem, as I saw it, was the sheer number of connections trying to be made. A quick glance around and I saw about 50% of the spectators were holding iPhones. Seriously, it was that high and a fair number looked as miffed as I was.

If the app had cost 59p I would have been inconvenienced and just carried on with my life. £20 is a different matter. Yes, it is a truly stunning app and one I still show people to demo the power and versatility of the iPhone but I’m still bitter.  They call the whole Formula 1 show the ‘F1 Circus’ and I do feel as though I’ve sat through a beautiful performance of the Cirque du Soleil only to be harassed by a clown at half-time who’s thrown a bucket of water over me.

Art Text is a graphic design application for the Mac which allows you to quickly create graphical resources such as icons, buttons, headers, logos and text graphics.  It is not a full graphics package such as PhotoShop but offers a good selection of functions in an easy to use app.

If you’re a graphical novice the program comes with a large array of samples to get you started.  These can easily be modified to suit your requirements.  The resultant artwork can be exported in many formats including png, pdf and jpg.

I bought Art Text to mock-up images before re-doing them in Photoshop or Expression Design but every time I draft an image I end up using it direct from Art Text.  I don’t miss too many of the advanced features offered by the more expensive packages either.  The ability to add some noise to a layer would be nice but its not a deal breaker for me.

If you have a Mac and are looking for an easy to use graphics package that can produce professional results then I highly recommend a good look at Art Text.  It could be the best $40 (about £25) you’ve spent in a while.

Clean – no fuss, no visual clutter.

Simple – the icon only has 3 layers: the background, the @ symbol and the glass effect (which is added by Apple).

Relevant – the @ symbol signifies a Twitter username (such as @usowicz).

By default the old icon is 57×57 pixels. Doubling up for the retina display requires a new icon of 114×114. Whilst the on-screen size is the same you get the retina effect due to 4x the pixel count in the icon. What’s really clever is the way that Apple handle the addition of the new icon. My existing icon was called Followers.png. To add the hi-res iPhone 4 retina icon you simply call it the same name as the original icon and add @2x to the end which gives me a second app icon file called Followers@2x.png.

To complete the full set of 4 icons I also doubled up the search/spotlight 29×29 icon. This gives me 4 icons covering both retina and pre-retina iPhones with sizes of 29×29, 57×57, 58×58 and 114×114. Full details, including the iPad icons which I haven’t included yet, can be found in the Apple reference library here.

I still have several other images to upgrade for the iPhone 4 before I release an update to the Followers app so in the meantime here’s a comparison of the two app icons side by side.

Visual harmony has been restored to my iPhone!

As I was comfortable in continuing my £35 a month contract I snagged a 16GB black iPhone 4 for £119. Not bad. However, when I came to pay the assistant she asked if I wanted to sell my old iPhone 3G to O2 – for £154! Seriously, this is a 2 year old 16GB iPhone 3G that I originally paid £159 for and they offered me £154 for it. That’s a paltry £5 depreciation over 2 years. I left O2 with a brand new iPhone 4 and £35 in my pocket. Brilliant.