iPhone OS 4.0: The death of the 3G
Hey Blancer readers. If you were on the internet this morning you most likely saw mention of the iPhone 4.0 preview. We did a predictions post yesterday and actually faired pretty well with our guesses.
- MultiTasking (No 3G) – CHECK
- iAd – CHECK
- iBooks – CHECK
- Folders – C?HECK
- Application Switching Update – CHECK
Lots of good news here, except for the lack of multitasking on the 3G. 3G owners shouldn’t expect to be getting any more of the features coming into major updates of the iPhone OS. The big news rests is all the new API’s though. With over 1500 new API’s being delivered to developers, we are sure to see another year of compelling and effective apps being brought into the app store. Lets look at a few of the specific API’s that are going to lead to some awesome apps!
Event Kit
The Calendar has always felt like an underdeveloped component of the iPhone operating system. It looks ok, syncs with my comp and MobileMe, Exchange and CalDev is cool too I suppose. But why can’t the Local Concerts app in the app store add actual calendar events reminding me of upcoming show I want to attend? Also, Apple has their calendar app, which is fine. But I’m sure there are some better UI’s that developers can come up with. I am excited to see how the developer community will leverage access to this section of the operating system.
Audio Visual Access
Apple has really opened up the doors to the camera on the 3GS. Some of the new API’s include a huge addition to AVFoundation. Things like AVAssetExportPreset1920×1080 are mentioned signaling the emergence of HD video output from application, which is going to really add a lot of functionality to iPhone and iPads.
Regular Expressions
This one is for all my computer science and math nerds out there. Whole new data type NSRegularExpression! This is going to be awesome for developers that are going to be making custom data detectors. Not necessarily something you will notice when being used in apps, but developers are going to have their lives made a little bit easier.
XML Parsing
Here at iCodeBlog we have done demos parsing XML using NSXMLParser. We have also mentioned the superior TouchXML classes. Apple is doing a lot of work to get NSXMLParser work better in iPhone 4.0. NSXMLParser is finally getting a delegate so that it conforms to the design patterns of the other classes within the OS. The delegate methods are still kind of dumb in my opinion but at least no more confusion because of the lack of delegate in that class!
Game Kit
Game Kit is impressive. It could very well become the only way games interact with the cloud, similar to xBox Live. Folks over at OpenFeint probably are not happy.
Map Kit
Map Kit got a HUGE update too. Draggable annotations, overlays, lots of added helper functions to calculate distance and position. Between this and background position tracking, position aware apps are going to get a lot better with this update.
Other Points Of Interest
Local Notifications are going to be awesome for some apps, especially third party reminder or to do apps. The page curl transition is now built in, which always adds a nice bit of flair to UI and will allow competition ebook readers a chance. Also the most mysterious possibly of the additions is QuickLook. How is this working? Will update once I get come code rolling and check it out. Any thoughts, comments, opinions, shot out in the comments section!
The final and maybe most missed point of today was Steve giving us developers a whole new method of getting work and revenue. Not only does iAd look like a killer new way to make some money with your free apps, it seems like the companies who are going to have ads in iAd will need us to make them. I can’t wait till I make my first bit of money displaying an ad I made in a free app I made. Talk about making money coming in and going out!