The App Store has finally launched. It’s available in iTunes 7.7 and from 2.0 iPhones and iPod Touch devices. Out of the 552 applications that are available today, I managed to get 4 applications listed. That’s almost 1% mindshare; not bad. And I have 5 more apps waiting for Apple’s review.
These are all applications that I have developed for clients:
There is an iPhoneDevCamp in NYC this weekend. Looks like a good un-conference event, so if you’re in the area, check it out. Sponsored by Socialight who are doing interesting things on mobile phones, and are apparently busy working on an iPhone version.
In light of yesterday’s “announcements” and rumors about the 3G iPhone, it’s good to remind yourself that there will eventually be new iPhones with different properties and capabilities than the current generation.
Developing for the iPhone is great because it’s a single platform. If you have ever tried to adapt a J2ME application for dozens of different phones, you know how painful that is. But don’t take the “single platform” idea too far and assume things like screen size.
Always ask the device about it’s capabilities and dimensions. For example, [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds] will give you the size of the screen your application can work with. Don’t hardcode 320 x 480 pixels. A good way to test your UI is to allow it to rotate between portrait and landscape mode. If the UI can handle that without breaking or looking distorted, it will probably adapt to other screen sizes as well.
Going back to the 3G example, how would you know if an iPhone is 3G connected to a 3G network? There is nothing specific to 3G in the current API. There is a kSCNetworkReachabilityFlagsIsWWAN flag in SCNetworkReachability which is defined as “EDGE, GPRS, or other cell connection”. That could include 3G. But since there is a significant speed difference between EDGE and 3G it would be nice if Apple added another flag specifically for 3G reachability.
Another possibility is the UIDevice class, and specifically it’s model property. Currently this contains “iPhone” or “iPod Touch”. An “iPhone 3G” model string would make it pretty clear that a phone is 3G capable. But that’s a pretty crude way of describing capabilities. And it puts the onus on each application to map device names to specific capabilities. When you think about all the different iPod models you realize that this will get out of hand pretty quickly.
What we really need is a new capabilities API or framework where an application can query the device for specific information such as screen size, RAM size, network capabilities, etc.
An interesting quantum mechanics effect makes it possible for some lucky owners of the current generation iPhone to connect to high-speed 3G networks today.
Hubert Hochsztapler, a researcher at the institute for nano-technology at The Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, discovered back in 2004 that old GSM cellphones could be used as 3G phones using the quantum tunneling phenomenon.
The iPhone was not tested by Hubert Hochsztapler and his colleagues, but our own lab reports today confirm that most current iPhones are already 3G capable. No new hardware is required.
The iPhone contains an accelerometer which measures minute movements of the iPhone. This turns out to be a great benefit to achieving the 3G capability. But due to interference from the accelerometer when it’s inactive, you first need to open an application on the iPhone that makes use of the accelerometer. The Safari browser is an excellent choice, since it will also allow you to visibly enjoy the effects of the faster data connection provided by 3G.
First turn the iPhone from portrait mode to landscape mode, back and forth a couple of times to ensure that the accelerometer is engaged and working. You should see the display change between portrait and landscape mode. Now start downloading a very large web page and simultaneously begin shaking the iPhone lightly along its y-axis. Think of the iPhone as the yoke of an aircraft. You want to avoid pitching and rolling the iPhone as you’re shaking it.
If you hit the right shaking-frequency (41 Hz seems to be optimal), the electrons in the iPhone will reach their tunnel state and the radio transmitter will “tunnel-up” and connect to the AT&T 3G network in your area (if one is available).
A Gartner analyst recently reported that Apple has already placed an order for 10 million units of the new 3G iPhone from their manufacturers in Asia. But when current iPhone owners discover that their iPhone already is 3G capable, they will not upgrade as Steve Jobs has decreed they should. This will effectively turn Apple’s 10M order into one big iBrickload of phones, says April F. Olson, an analyst covering the AAPL stock for Hochs Securities.
This technical trick has been confirmed to work only on non-jailbroken 1.1.4 firmware phones (also known as the 4.1 release in the U.S.).
Please report your success with your “new” 3G iPhone in the comments below.
Today is March 14th (3/14 in American date format) which has a striking similarity to an approximation of the mathematical constant pi (3.14159265…)
Therefore math geeks are of course celebrating Pi Day today.
Watching the iPhone Software Roadmap event and at the same checking the iPhone Dev Center page. No updates yet.
Steve Jobs just announced that the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) will be available today. Yeah! Brace yourself at Apple, your servers are about to come under siege.
The Apple web site is now so slow that it’s practically useless. Finally managed to get through the registration and begin the download.
Checked out the KPCB site to get more info on the iFund. That site is overloaded too. You would think that KPCB would have the connections with the right companies in Silicon Valley to get help with their web site. After all, they own large chunks of all the major Internet companies.
Seven hours later…
The download is finally complete. To my amazement the file is complete and error free. Kudos to the Apple web site infrastructure team. Making sure that the connections that did get through to the site are maintained under such a crushing site load is no small feat.
After a whole day of waiting it took me all of 5 minutes to get the first application compiled, built and running in the iPhone simulator.
This is really cool!
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