OS X Software

Standford University are currently doing an iphone development course for students that wish to learn the ins and outs of the iphone SDK and programming language.

The best bit is that all of the material and lecture notes will be made available for the general public to download and work through themselves.

The first part of the lectures notes seem to be online at http://cs193p.stanford.edu/ and there seems to be plans to be another 9 covering other areas of iPhone development.

If you are looking at getting an iPhone development license to make a start, then there can’t be much better places to look for help than here for the moment.

Well theres a lot more than expected, the conference brought many announced additions and fixes.

The major ones being cut and paste, support for MMS messages, Proper GPS (turn by turn), full Bluetooth connectivity and Push notifications.

The GPS additions will allow for a greater degree of accuracy which will make for better navigation in Car GPS software etc.

You will now be able to send MMS messages with voice, pictures and video as well as SMS messages like before.

The new bluetooth will allow for better connectivity to 3rd party app’s but will also possibly allow for a much improved iphone to iphone connectivity. So expect things like contact sharing and multiplayer gaming via bluetooth.

Push notifications will allow notifications of events to be sent to your iphone. For example, Meebo showed a demo of their messenger service which showed a SMS style notification when new messages were received.
This will also allow for better Email Push.

All we have to do now is wait a few months for it to be released!

Over the coming hours light will be shed upon the next mile stone for the iPhones Operating System.

The rumoured features have been mentioned and we will finally see if any of them bring any truth!

I’m personally hoping for background apps and just general tweaks and improvements, the copy and paste doesn’t really bother me that much.

It would also be nice if the push capabilities were worked on as google still haven’t updated their push service to include email yet.

You can expect to see news from the conference here and hopefully some excellent new feature write ups!

As the title suggests, have you ever been on a plane and spent like 25 minutes trying to find something that would prop up your iphone?

I have. I swear I spent 30 minutes using a combination of magazines and empty peanut bags trying to make my iphone stand up on its side, by itself without me having to hold it infront of me.
If you hold up your iphone for 2-3 hours straight on a plane watching movies, you will find your arm will be completely dead.

I actually stumbled accross this which is pretty genius. It has a built in flip down stand that completely tucks away out of view when not in use.

Finally I can watch my iphone without destroying my arm! Woot!

At the recent Diggnation event, founder of digg.com started the rumour ball rolling with a few announcements about what he predicts will be part of the iPhone OS 3.0.

Points of interest are that they claim Apple want to speed up the iPhone to be on par with the Pre Palm, so natural speed improvements accross the board are to be expected.

Copy and Paste features are also rumoured to be introduced which is another downside of the iPhone gone.

He also mentioned that he thinks background apps won’t be introduced which would be a real shame if true. Once you get used to the backgrounder app mentioned last week here, it’s hard to think how you used the iPhone without it! Especially if you use instant messenging services.

Either way we will have to see, the conference which is suppsoed to announce 3.0 is on the 27th, so hopefully some of these rumours will come to light.

Many know Cydia if you have a jailbroken iPhone. It allows developers to distrube apps much like the app store.

Apple declines your newly written app? Simple, distribute it via Cydia.

Cydia have now announced that they have turned their system into a full fledged shop allowing developers to now charge money for each app, with payment processing handled by Amazon.

The early system is a bit shakey, however in time, this will be a handy side store for those app’s that don’t make it on the official store (Backgrounder app!).

You can get and update Cydia the usual way!

Possibly the best app I have found to date is the backgrounder.

First the bad news. It requires a jailbroken phone.

For those of you that do however, prepare to see your iPhone in a different light. I have always been jealous of g1 users being able to have an msn client running in the background whilst they view the web, or SMS people etc.

To achieve this on your iphone you will firstly need to go to cydia.

Load up cydia then make sure you download the updated app list which often is automatic.

After you have updated the list goto search and type in background.

Scroll down to the B section and you should see “Backgrounder”

Scroll down past the details and hit install / download. If Cydia asks to update essential files, do this before isntalling backgrounder to minimise any errors that could occur.

Once everything is installed you will be able to run your MSN client as usual (I use palringo), but hold the home button and you will be presented with a message pop up telling you the app is now running in the background.

And there you have it, iPhone multitasking at it’s finest!

One thing to mention is that the more processes running, the quicker your battery will be drained, which is generally pretty quick with a lot of apps running.

I read an interesting article today from the times which is a very basic guide of how to get into development for the iphone.

They talk about the languages and packages you will require such as  Objective-C and Cocoa Touch and also Xcode which is the main development tool.

To add to this, it’s worth noting that you have to pay 99$ for the license to develop.

It’s a good idea to make sure you know what you want to create and make sure you have it planned out, as 99$ is a lot to waste on a license you aren’t going to use, or use for 1 bored night and never go back to it (that’s me).

Another little tip is to do what I generally do. Fire up Amazon, and search for iphone game development, then list the results by product reviews and pick out the popular 5 star books!

I generally use a lot of the customer feedback to point me to the book I’m going to buy, mostly because each book can be like 23£ each, so buying 2 is normally out of the question.

Either way, good luck if you choose to develop for the app store, 70% of sales profit could be yours!

Make sure you name your game to be similar to the leading listed games to get a free high search listing! NO seriously now, don’t do that, it’s the most annoying thing in the world when searching for games.

I was recently at my new little cousins baby shower which was helped on by these guys. I got back in and started to answer unread texts on my phone. Went to send my replies and it kept erroring. I later discovered I had run out of credit which wsa unusual as I had atleast 3-4£ on the previous day.

I had also the previous day set up push with yahoo and Gmail.

Yahoo pushes the emails to my phone whilst Gmail syncs the calendars and contacts. I knew it was gonna cost me a little bit in data, but 3-4£ in the space of 2 days? I have no idea how it managed that, unless I maybe accidentally clicked on something internet based by accident whilst out. Either way, I’m now out of credit again after recently topping up.

The solution? A cheap 1 month contract with unlimited data useage!

Now I have to go through the hassle of getting a PAC code to move my number to a different provider

That will probably take a week as they insist on sending the number by post and not via email which is annoying. Then my new provider will probably take 8 years to use that PAC code to switch to my old number. You also have to remember that in this time I’m being charged for my new contract, and to top it off the contract start date is the moment you sign up, meaning I miss 3-4 days of the month due to the sim being in the post, followed by time waiting for a PAC code in the post, followed by new provider using said PAC code to finally get me up and running.

Argh!

It might not come as a surprise to some, but this seems to be an official statement on the matter which I think hasn’t been said before via Apple themselves.

For those that don’t know, jailbreaking your iPhone refers to installing custom firmware to allow 3rd party software to be run without Apples approval of that said software.

The statement is here for those that want a closer look.

It will be interesting to see if Apple try to take action to those that have Jailbroke their phone already. As far as I’m aware no iPhone has been blocked by Apple for doing so as of yet.

Either way, I wouldn’t be worried about Jailbreaking your phone if you wanted to, the precedure of doing so is pretty simple and it’s probably just Apple scare tactics on the matter.

In MobileMes latest blog it has been announced that a file sharing option has been added to the iDisk interface.

Although not a full implementation of file sharing is still seems like a handy addition.

It works by sending a link to a recipient via email. The link sent is pointed to your shared file via iDisk.

So as you can see, it’s a bit of a work around, but still, any feature updates are welcome to a service that hasn’t seen that many.

If you have a mobileme package already then I would check this out to avoid sending huge file attachments to friends and family. If you are still sitting on the “should I get MobileMe fence” I wouldn’t recommend getting the service just for this tiny feature!

Yup, it was inevitable.

According to Admob’s report here the iPhone has 51% of the mobile web browsing space.

After the large sales of the iphone throughout this year and last, it’s not too surprising that this is now the case.

With the Safari browser being quick and efficenet compared to other mobile devices on the market and also the unlimited web browsing traffic contracts, it comes as no shock that the iPhone is dominating this area.

However, with Android growing and the new Palm offerings on the up it will be interesting to see if this is still the case this time next year.

A recent Apple blog article that can be found here has announced that general syncing speeds for mobileme and your iphone have been further increased, basically giving the service a more responscive feel.

The idea is to acheive a microsoft exchange feel where your mobile device constantly syncs and sends any new information to your computer or mobile device depending where you are.

It would seem that instead of extra features Apple is focussing on network and coding improvements which is always good to see before they move on to add more bells and whistles.

For those that want more info on mobileme it can easily be reached at Apple.com/uk to purchase it. It’s based on a yearly subscription, price depends on the package you pick.

I recently tried out googles new sync tools allowing you to create a microsoft exchange account on the iPhone linked to Gmail.

When the product is finished it will allow you to seeminglessly push your Calendar events, Contacts and Email to the iPhone the second they are received or created on Gmail.

The normal Gmail account doesn’t allow this and Email is retrieved by the fetch setting, which just pings the Gmail servers checking for your email every 5/10/15 minutes depending on what you pick.

The app is currently in beta at the moment and has the email push disabled, however it’s worth setting up now for when a release version comes out at a later date.

The link to set it up is at m.google.com

Mac Rumours has found an interesting piece of information hidden inside the latest firmware for the iphone.

The firmware has a list of devices buried inside it incluiding the iphone 1g and 3g, ipod touch 1st gen / 2nd gen etc.

Whilst browsing through the list a 3rd revision of the iphone was found to be listed in there next to the 1g and 3g models.

Does this mean that we are on track for a new iphone come June?

Now we just need some product description or picture leaks to be found to satisfy our curiousity!

Taking bets on an iPhone nano!

Link: New iPhone?