Case for a perfect status bar

I was not going to write this post until I heard Federico Viticci, Mike Hurley and Stephen Hackett remembering the good old days during the “Roasting Our Past Selves” episode from the Connected podcast. The podcast is great fun, you should subscribe.

Apple product shots have perfect status bars and a clock set to 9:41.¹ Naturally some indie publishers and journalists started to pay attention to this detail. Federico even started to use a Python script for status bar editing. At that time I was inspired to ship a little utility app called Altershot whose entire purpose is redacting status bars.

I am excited to remember these old days, this subject is important to me because Altershot is my first commercial app idea, I designed it for people like Federico. When I tweeted the link to the app, Federico replied with something like “I need this in my life!”. It made my day.

I am still maintaining the app. Recently I shipped version 2.2 which introduced non-destructive photo editing, at least one person was waiting eight years for this feature. Thank you for your patience, Mr Toner.