iPhone Development Blog

Since April when I received my iPad, I have not purchased a single magazine or book in dead tree form. This was not a conscious decision or strategy, but merely a consequence of the convenience of iBooks and Zinio Magazine Reader.

Two eBooks that I recently read and enjoyed very much are Daemon and Freedom (TM) by Daniel Suarez. The story is about an MMOG that takes over the world. It’s extremely well written and the author is a programmer, so the technical details are believable.

Be sure to get both books. The first one — Daemon — ends without a satisfying conclusion, and Freedom will not make much sense without first reading the Daemon.

Since the iBookstore is not visible in iTunes and there’s no gifting option in iBooks, one way to give these books as a gift is to purchase a regular iTunes Gift Card or Gift Certificate. You may also find specific iBooks gift cards in some stores.

The iBookstore lives a somewhat schizophrenic life. You can’t search or browse books on the web or in iTunes, like you can with apps and music. But yet it is part of the iTunes payment infrastructure. The only way I’ve found to create links to specific books, like the ones above, is to use the Tell a Friend feature in iBooks.

written by Nick \\ tags: iBookstore, iTunes

Out of the blue we were contacted by Apple; they wanted to meet with us. It took us about two microseconds to say yes. So today we’re at the famous One Infinite Loop for a secret meeting. Regardless of the outcome of the meeting, we’re honored to have our work recognized and to have been invited.

As good fanboys we’ll have to visit the Apple Company Store on campus after the meeting to pick up “I visited the Mothership.” T-shirts and other swag that’s only sold there.

written by Nick

Conference season is upon us again.

APPNATION

This new conference took place in San Francisco last week. It was more business oriented and not a developers conference. A couple of our clients attended and said it provided great networking opportunities and they even managed to get the press to write about their app.

JV Alert Live – Denver – September 24-26

This is not an iPhone developers conference either, but it’s a chance to see me on stage. I will be participating in panel discussions, providing a perspective on mobile business opportunities. This is a really good conference for networking.

iPhone/iPad DevCon 2010 – San Diego – September 27-29

Bills themselves as “the first major developer conference after the release of Apple’s iPhone 4 hardware and iOS 4″. A lot of good workshops and technical classes on the schedule.

Voices That Matter: iPhone Developers Conference – Philadelphia – October 16-17

VTM is back again with a great lineup of speakers. This time it’s on the east coast.

360|iDev – Austin, TX – November 7-10

One of my favorite conferences is 360|iDev. I will not be speaking this time, but at least one of my colleagues will be attending.

360|MacDev – Denver – December 10-11

The good folks at 360 Conferences are launching a new conference geared towards Mac Desktop developers. Picking up the torch after C4 ended.

written by Nick \\ tags: conference

One of the most popular pages on this blog is App Store Rejection Reasons. Since Apple refused to tell us what the “real” rules for the App Store approval process were, I shared my experiences in the hope that other developers could avoid making the same mistakes. The page ends with call to Apple to release all the hidden rules. Today Apple finally listened.

Here are finally the App Store Review Guidelines. The language of the guidelines is surprisingly informal; definitely not a product of Apple’s legal department. This makes it all the more believable that this is the actual internal checklist that reviewers use.

Daring Fireball has a nice collection of extracts from the guidelines that are funny, frank or puzzling.

I hope that Apple will start referring to these guidelines in their rejection emails, instead of the more diffuse paragraphs of the Developer Program License Agreement. This would also force them to add to the list as soon as apps are rejected and there’s no matching guideline to point to.

Apple also instituted an App Review Board where you appeal any app rejections. Obviously this is not an independent third party board, so don’t set your hopes too high. But instituting a formal review board is a great move by Apple. Hopefully the result will be less randomness in the approvals and rejections.

In another good move today, Apple also updated the iOS Developer Program License Agreement. Many of the egregious paragraphs that were added this spring with the apparent intent to stifle competition, have been removed. Bravo!

Now let’s hope that the HIG rules will still keep most of the bad Flash apps at bay…

written by Nick \\ tags: App Store

The more I think about the possibilities of iOS apps on the new Apple TV, the less likely I think it will be. The two main stumbling blocks are:

1. The difficulty of translating a touch interface to a TV screen.
2. The new Apple TV has no storage; it’s a streaming only device.

But all may not be lost. I think the new AirPlay could open some interesting opportunities. A game that you play on your iPhone is very personal because of the small screen. But if the content of the iPhone screen was streamed to your TV then your friends can follow the game too.

Expand this to games that can utilize multiple devices, like Scrabble, and you can imagine some really interesting game play.

Granted all these devices will quickly add up in cost way beyond a Wii. But for an iHousehold most of these devices are probably already owned, including a few retired iDevices.

Another interesting aspect of this setup is that you don’t have to carry a stack of DVDs over to your friend’s house, you probably already have your iPhone with you and it is ready to play.

What do you think? What kind of entertainment apps would you like to play this way on your TV?

written by Nick \\ tags: Apple TV

The fantastic rumors finally faced reality today when Apple presented their new fall lineup of devices. Here are my thoughts as an iOS developer on today’s announcements.

Live Streaming

It was great to be able to watch a live stream of the event instead of having to refresh half a dozen browser windows from various live bloggers. Rumors claimed that this might be a load test of Apple’s new data center. In reality the stream was served by Akamai (Apple’s longtime CDN partner) as evident by the edgesuite.net URL.

New iPod Nano

A new touch screen that looks very much like iOS. Except according to an Apple spokesman backstage, it isn’t iOS. That’s too bad. This would be a fun little device to write apps for. We’ll keep our collective fingers crossed that Apple will allow iOS-like apps to run on this device in the future. In the meantime I’m sure the jailbreak community will take a closer look at what’s really under the hood and find a way to run code on it.

New iPod Touch

Nothing unexpected here. Slight disappointment that the main camera is rather poor. If you’re relying on the camera for things like bar code scanning, this could spell trouble. I wonder if this “downgrade” is due to cost, a physical space constraint or a reflection of Apple’s intended audience for this device?

iTunes Ping

Apple is not content on just having an iTunes presence on Facebook, they want to be the social network. With 160 million credit card carrying iTunes users, they definitely have a running start. I really liked how they emphasized the privacy controls in Ping; a nice jab at Facebook.

As a developer I want an API to integrate with Ping. I think one of the critical success factors of Facebook is that they have established themselves as the social platform. A more integrated social platform within the iTunes/iOS ecosystem could be very interesting. Which of course begs the question of how does Game Center fit into this? Since both Game Center and Ping use iTunes accounts as the user identifier, it seems possible to merge or integrate the two in some way in the future.

New Apple TV

Smaller and cheaper, but nothing revolutionary. I love how Steve Jobs sells the idea of removing something (storage in this case) as a great benefit.

John Gruber claims that the new Apple TV does run iOS. It may be splitting hairs, but in my mind iOS implies UIKit, which is heavily oriented towards a touch interface, which I did not see much of in the demo. We’ll keep hoping that there will eventually be 3rd party apps and an App Store for the Apple TV.

For my media center, I will probably stick with my Mac Mini with Plex for now.

iOS Updates

iOS 4.1 is being released next week. Since we’ve had beta versions for a while, that’s no surprise. iOS 4.2 is coming in November which will be the first 4.x update for the iPad. While November technically qualifies as “fall”, it would have been nice to get all the 4.x goodness a bit sooner.

Overall 3 major OS releases within the span of 6 months is just a relentless pace. I wonder when the iOS development team at Apple last had a vacation? The competition is not sitting idle either, it’s definitely a great game to watch unfold. A huge benefit that Apple and iOS enjoys is the ease with which customers can upgrade to the latest iOS version. This greatly simplifies the life for us developers in that we can to a large degree assume the the latest version as a deployment target.

AirPlay

I think the most interesting announcement was AirPlay. This is an improved version of AirTunes. Now you can share audio, video, and photos with meta data between iOS devices (running iOS 4.2) and compatible accessories. A cool demonstration of this was at the very end when Steve Jobs was watching a movie on an iPad and then shared the video stream with an Apple TV. It’s not a stretch to imagine that the screen of any iOS app could be shared this way. I wonder if this is what the rumors about iOS apps on the Apple TV (nee iTV) were really based on.

written by Nick \\ tags: News

I’ve updated the App Store Rejection Reasons page with a few new items related to the iPad UI.

written by Nick \\ tags: iPad

Today Apple announced their new iOS 4 Readiness Checklist. As a trailing sentence, almost as an afterthought, was this: “In addition, the App Store will no longer support applications that target iOS 2.x.”

That last sentence can be interpreted in several ways:

• You will no longer be able to upload apps to the App Store that target iOS 2.x.
• The App Store will really not support 2.x apps anymore and all such apps will therefore be removed.

The interpretation could have a significant impact on existing apps for several of our clients, so I called Apple for a clarification.

The official word is that going forward you will not be able to upload new or update existing apps that target iOS 2.x. All existing apps in the App Store will remain for sale even if they target iOS 2.x.

That of course is the sensible path. Although a general cleanup of the App Store to get rid of old apps that have not been updated since the 2.x days, might not be a bad idea…

written by Nick

It’s clear that Apple is feeling the heat from the competition in the mobile space. Matt Drance eloquently analyzed Steve Jobs keynote presentation on the first day. The avalanche of information just accelerated during the rest of the week. The expression “drinking from a fire hose” came up frequently in conversations during the week.

In a previous life I was an enterprise Java architect and dutifully made the annual pilgrimage to the JavaOne conference. In the beginning of Java, the language and the API:s were small enough that you could grasp everything. But at one point everything exploded and there was no way to keep up with all the new API:s and all the new things Java was attempting to do. I feel that we’re approaching that point with iOS (formerly known as the iPhone OS).

The complexity of the platform has also increased. Take multitasking for example. Managing database connections and open sockets when your app is transitioned between the active/inactive/running/background running/suspended states, is not trivial. Neither is scheduling a background task to complete when your app is about to stop running, while also dealing with the fact that the background task can also be interrupted. And this is just one set of new API:s.

Recently I’ve been doing some code reviews for clients. One of the first things I do is to run the static analyzer. When that comes back with 170 warnings, I get disappointed. Why would you as a developer ever release code that has over a hundred memory warnings? Especially when the static analyzer is one of the easiest Xcode tools to run: just select Build and Analyze instead of Build from the Build menu. Apple is releasing a slew of new tools and instruments to help you analyze and tune your iOS apps. These tools are very powerful, and they definitely have a learning curve.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining. On the contrary I think this is all great for us professional iPhone developers. Keeping your skills up to date with the latest tools and technologies is the best way to stay ahead of the pack. For consumers it’s even better. Without investing any time or effort we get to enjoy the fruits of the accelerated innovation coming out of Apple and the competition.

written by Nick \\ tags: conference

Sorry about the lack of posts here lately. I’ve been working overtime to clear the decks with existing projects so that I can enjoy WWDC.

If you’re at WWDC don’t hesitate to say hi if you see me. I’m also open to party invitations and more serious meetings to explore business opportunities.

written by Nick