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iPhone 3.0 Software Announced
Apple unveiled the iPhone 3.0 software just now in Cupertino. Here's MacWorld's live-action blow-by-blow coverage. The announcement included new features for developers and users. For developers, the big items were in-app purchasing (for example for game upgrades, map content, and subscriptions) for paid apps only; peer-to-peer connectivity via Bluetooth; giving apps access to hardware via the dock connector or Bluetooth; maps embeddable in apps; and push notifications. For users, there's finally cut-copy-paste available in all apps; search across everything in the iPhone; landscape keyboard; MMS messaging; and voice memos. Developer beta starts today and 3.0 will be available in the summer — free for all 3G phones, $10 for iPod Touch.
Filtering is best done server side. For me the to-do list is:
Flash
Java
Printing
Record video from the camera
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I, for one, am not looking forward to being spammed in my apps to pay "Only $.99 for this new widget! Click Now!". I expect everything from EA to be even worse on this platform than it has been to date.
Did you see that FPS demo where the guy had to pay extra to get the rocket launcher? That does **not** make me want to play that game.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
The new SDK will allow developers to control accessories attached to the dock adapter. I'm really hopeful someone will make a card reader...it would so nice to bring a 32GB iPod touch on trips instead of a MacBook Pro.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This only came up in the Q&A afterwards, but tethering is a new feature supported by OS 3.0, but Apple are not making a big thing of it yet because it's going to need to be negotiated with the phone carriers before it can be rolled out.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I think the answer might be neither. In a Q&A at the end of the demo, someone asked a cryptic question with an equally cryptic answer:
From the Gizmodo live blog:
Q: Bluetooth human input device profile for external keyboards.
A: We have nothing to announce.
Considering how they went to great pains to announce individual features of bluetooth that they were using, and avoided talking about bluetooth filesharing, I think they are hinting that bluetooth keyboards are not in the cards at the moment.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
So you really want a Blackberry Storm with an Apple logo on it?
How about a blackberry storm with a proper touch interface? That's what I want.
(And no I actually don't mind the click screen at all; i actually quite like it even.)
I just can't stand the fact that there is no velocity/momentum support. Want to scroll the screen? On either device just move finger. Works great. Want to scroll up faster?
On an iphone move finger faster - screen scrolls faster. Flick it and the screen scrolls really fast and gradually slows down.
On a storm. move finger faster, screen scrolls at the same speed. Flick it and the storm scrolls at the same speed and then stops immediately after your finger leaves it.
On an iphone when you reach the bottom it sort of 'overshoots' its a bit and stops to show you there is no more. On a storm... you hit the bottom and it stops. But it doesn't give you that visual cue that you are at the bottom.
It goes on... the storm has a comparatively putzy touch support. I hear its because finger movements are just mapped to the old simple trackball/wheel commands (up, down, left, right, click) instead of providing a proper touch api to handle all the additional information.
Whether you agree with them or not, that's their position (presumably that of their highly-paid lawyers, too).
Well I, for one, don't agree with them. And I see nothing wrong what-so-ever in raising a public stink about it everytime they do it. Its complete bullshit, and they deserve the backlash for being money grubbing assholes.
My motherboards over the years have been routinely released with new firmware that adds new functionality. As have been my routers. As has my Nintendo Wii. Even my HDTV was firmware updated with new features.
Only apple tries to charge me for firmware upgrades while trying to claim that they have to. I've downloaded all the previous firmwares via p2p and this will be no exception.
I'd actually be inclined to pay for it though, if Apple simply charged for it, and said hey its an upgrade, we feel its worth a few bucks. But instead they've tried to raise some bullshit rationalization that they are legally obligated to charge for it.
Its total bullshit. And I'm calling them on it. Again.
Our management have been chomping at the bit to get iphones.
Unfortunately they've also mandated we s/mime encrypt all intra-company email, which doesn't work on the thing as you can't install a certificate.
Does anyone with access to the new SDK know if certs have been added to the thing?
The really interesting thing in the announcement I thought was a hint that there might possibly be some low level of bacground apps. They were not clear on what they meant but this is a big deal.
People have complained there is no flash. At first I assumed, like most folks, this was because apple was stiffing adobe. Then after I started programming for iphone I got a glimpse of why I think there is no flash.
Basically there can only be one app runnning and resident at a time. When you switch between apps and then come back to say safari, it comes back to where you left it so from your point of view it looks like safari was resident and running while your attention was elsewhere. But this is not the case.
It's a clever illusion. Apps have to manage their own persistence. So to make it seem like that safari or any app has to save and restore it's complete state. And the apple iphone rules require this all has to happen in under 5 seconds or you get a kill -9 applied to your slow ass.
Now imagine safari is also running flash under the hood. It does not have the flash internal sate that it can save and restore so how can safari persist a flash system across sessions? It could try a desperation move and try sweeping out the memory as an image. But that won't work since it won't have permission from the OS to do that. Even if it did have permission, then what if flash is storing things on disk, how is safari supposed to keep all the file handles open across sessions?
You could probably come up with some workaround kludges but it would not be pretty.
And then there's that 5 second problem. If safari has to load and resotre it's state almost instantly, you don't want it having to speculatively reload flash every session start just because at some point in your browsing history you opened a flash web site. You'd have a really annoying end result of delaying the application swap for everyone by a second or two every time.
So you can see it's not as simple as it sounds due to the one-app resident at a time rule.
since the iphone has no Virtual memory, you can't just let it be resident and not running either.
thus you can see allowing background apps is not something to do lightly or get yourself locked into (like for example, windows CE) and have to have a task and memory management the user must control.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Things still inexplicably missing:
Video recording (Cycorder on Jailbroken phones does it just fine)
Voice Dialing
"Try before you Buy" App Store sales model
Flash support for the Safari Browser
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't