Brian’s Brain’s Blog

Biggest pre-WWDC rumors:

1. New iPhone H/W
2. Web pad
3. Steve sighting

More details from a Top-10 list:

1. Multiple configs, prices starting at $99
2. Wireless movie and TV downloads
3. Increased storage, RAM and faster CPU
4. Magnetometer (digital compass) and OLED screen
5. Limited third-party background apps
6. FM transmitter
7. Better camera & video
8. Similar look to iPhone 3G
9. Voice control
10. Illuminated Apple Logo

Finally made it in to the Keynote. Cover your ears. I’m PISSED! Get here at 8:00am and miss the first 25 minutes of the Keynote! That sucks!

Anyway, CNET is live-blogging at: Live blog: WWDC 2009 keynote so I was able to follow the Mac H/W announcements.

They are now talking about Snow Leopard, the upgrade to Leopard. It was supposed to be just about bug fixes, but all they are showing is new features!

• Expose and Spaces now have better integration. Click and hold on dock icon, and see all open windows for that app.
• Very cool new features in safari - cover view browsing through history, with each page shown graphically.
• Quicktime now allows you to trim and share videos while viewing.
• All major system applications are running in 64-bit mode. Description of how Grand Central Dispatch takes advantage of multicore.
• Exchange support will now be included in Mail, Address Book and iCal.

Observation: Just like last year, the applause is only in the Keynote room. The overflow room is silent. I wonder if the applause is from plants?

• Available for all Intel Macintoshes, past and present. Leopard is $129. Snow Leopard is a $29 upgrade for Leopard users. OK, that one got applause. $49 for family pack.
• Available in September. Developer preview today.

OK, now on to the iPhone!

• SDK - 1 million downloads
• 50K apps on the AppStore
• 40M iPhones/iPod Touches sold
• Video of iPhone developers - games, medical, sports - OK, applause for that, too.
• OS 3.0 - Apps
  • Cut, copy and paste
    • Undo support (shake the phone)
    • Developer APIs
  • Landscape
    • Extended to all apps
  • ITunes
    • Rent and purchase movies from phone
  • MMS
    • Lots of laughter since no AT&T
  • Tethering
    • More laughter since no AT&T
  • Safari
    • Autofill
    • HTTP streaming
  • Find My iPhone
    • MobileMe will show location on map
    • Send message to phone “iPhone come home”
    • Alert sound even if in silent mode
• OS 3.0 - SDK
  • 1000 new APIs
  • inApp purchasing
  • Peer-to-peer networking
  • Accessory APIs
    • Via dock connector or Bluetooth
  •  Embedded Maps
    • Developers are now allowed to provide turn by turn
  • Push Notification
    • Push text alerts, badges, alert sounds
  • •  
• OS 3.0 Developer Demos
  • gameloft - Asphalt 5 
    • race game
• • • 27 cars, 5 motorcycles
    • “car stereo” can access iTunes library from within game!
    • Also using inApp purchase and inGame Voice
  • Airstrip Technologies
    • Medical
    • Sends “strips” to doctor’s iPhone.
    • Push notification of patient alerts.
    • Live streaming of vital signs.
    • Waiting for FDA clearance for new app
  • ScrollMotion
    • Icebook eReader
    • InApp purchase of books, magazines and newspapers
    • 1 Million books will be available, including textbooks
    • Copy and e-mail content
  • TomTom
    • Navigation in the iPhone
    • Turn-by-turn with Voice
    • Tom-tom car kit
      • Docks iPhone
      • Attaches to windshield or dashboard
      • Handsfree calling
      • Plays music over car stereo
      • GPS extensions
    • Available this summer
  • ngmoco
    • iPhone games
    • Star Defense
    • inApp purchase
    • head-to-head play
  • Pasco
    • Science Education - Experiments
    • Spark for iPhone
    • Sensors feed right into iPhone through docking connector
    • Demo demons - no pressure in the air hose trying to blow up the balloon
  • Zipcar
    • Zipcar iPhone app
    • 25% of Zipcar members live on the iPhone
    • Embedded maps
    • Tap horn icon on iPhone beeps car’s horn!
    • Tap unlock on iPhone unlocks car
  • Line 6 and Planet Waves
    • Control guitar and Amp from iPhone
    • Make guitar sound like completely different guitar
• OS 3.0 
  •  Free for iPhones
  • $9.95 for iPod Touch
  • Available worldwide June 17
  • GM Seed available to developers today
• New iPhone?  We still have a few minutes…
  • 2/3 of all mobile browsing is on iPhone
  • 50K apps
    • 5K Android
    • 1K for others
• iPhone 3GS
  • Looks like 3G
  • S is for speed
    • 2 x faster to load apps
    • 3 x faster to load web pages and view attachments
• • • Javascript on 3Gs is 8 x faster than 3G OS 2.2.1
    • Faster 3G support (7.2Mbps HSDPA)
  • New Camera
    • 3MPixel
    • Autofocus
    • Tap to focus - tap on what you want in focus
    • Automacro - 10cm
  • Video
    • 30 fps
    • VGA
    • Auto focus
    • Auto white balance
    • Auto exposure
    • Videos live in Picture application
    • Timeline
      • scrub and edit
    • Share
      • E-mail
      • MMS
      • MobileMe
      • YouTube
    • APIs
  • Voice Control
    • Voice dialing
    • Hold home button
    • Also interfaces with iPod
      • “What’s playing?”
  • Digital Compass
    • Integrated into maps
  • Nike+ Integrated
  • Better battery life - 3G +0-50%
  • Price
    • $299 - 3Gs 32GB
    • $199 - 3Gs 16GB
    • $99 - 3G 8GB
    • Available June 19

Today is the first day of geekfest, I mean Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2009!

I’ll be live-blogging the conference (well, perhaps “lightly-delayed blogging”). I’ll also post other live blogging sites that I come across.

First News: The room for the 10:00am Keynote filled up at 8:00am! Shoot. It’s the overflow room again for me!

More News: Keynote minus 30 minutes. The line is around the block, as shown here:

View Larger Map

So I’m hanging out inside, where I can sit on the floor and use wifi. We’ll see how much of the keynote I end up missing…

OK, 10:03. Time to try to get inside!

It seems every time I need to add some functionality to my app, I end up refactoring other code in the app so the new functionality can use it.  This is a GOOD thing.  Especially when one is not yet an expert in iPhone app development.  

It takes a fair amount of experimenting to learn how to write for the iPhone.  This experimentation yields pretty messy code, but code nonetheless.  In an ideal world I would throw away this experimental code and rewrite it once I learned the “right way”.  However, I fear no app would ever get finished that way.

Instead, go ahead and use the experimental code, realizing that it isn’t perfect.  Fix and clean it when you either need to reuse it somewhere else (and refactor mercilessly), or when you find that your code doesn’t really work as well as you thought, e.g. it won’t rotate worth a darn.

Now if I can just get the testers to install it!

Enabling rotation has been a pain, and I’m not sure it is really all that necessary for my app, but it has certainly forced me to clean up my code. It seems like every single thing I had done “wrong” in the code broke when I turned on rotation. It has forced me to really clean up my view controllers and memory management. In the end, I might even turn off rotation. But enabling it will have been good for the app in the long run.

Today’s tip: Enable rotation in your app! It’s the good kind of pain!

And today’s learning is regarding Objective-C and accessors, from Scott Stevenson at theocacao.com:

When using properties with the dot syntax, prefix the name with self to use the accessor:

// direct access
value = studio; 
studio = value;

// uses accessor methods, sends KVO notifications
self.studio = value;
value = self.studio

Even if you have garbage collection enabled, you should still use the accessor methods in most cases because Key-Value Observing, and Cocoa Bindings depend on these methods being called to synchronize changes across objects.

A subtle point, but an important one. Especially when dealing with pesky object retention problems!

9:30 - I know that everyone is waiting with baited breath! Well, I have to say, “not yet”. I was all ready to enable rotation (2nd try), when I realized I needed to do my scroll view memory usage optimization first. Unfortunately, that exposed some previously hidden memory management issues, which forced me to learn some new tools and finally figure out Objective-C memory management. Now I seem to have that solved, so I can check it in and get on to rotation. Except, wait, I did get the app to crash last night, so better look at that first…

10:00 - Ah, the debugger’s nightmare. Console log was gone, crash log no help, and can’t reproduce it. Oh, well, sure I’ll see it again later. Time to check-in!

10:10 - Are the “blog” gods as powerful as the “demo” gods? Just as soon as I wrote the last paragraph, I crashed the app! Let’s see why I won’t be able to debug this one…

10:30 - Again, no console log, crash log no help. Gotta see if I can reproduce it while plugged in… YES!

12:44 - Got a bunch of stuff fixed. I want to write it is ready for check-in, but I know now that I wrote that, something will crash…

14:09 - Cleaned up and ready to check-in!

Today is Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0 announcement. I’ll capture my thoughts here.

The iPhone OS 3.0 Announcement Scorecard is pretty good. Hopefully we’ll see more than a few of these!

Here we go:

Overview:

• 13.7 Million iPhones shipped
• 800,000 downloads of the SDK
• 50,000 iphone developers
• Gameloft has had 2 million downloads
• 25K apps in the app store
• 96% of submissions are approved
• 800 million app downloads (and the rate seems to be stable, perhaps even accelerating)

SDK 3.0 preview:

• Major update to the OS
• 1,000 new APIs (is that a good thing?)
• New App store models (”In-App Purchase”)
  • Buy new game levels
  • eBooks
  • Subscriptions
  • Still uses iTunes store (sweet!)
  • 70% still goes to developer
  • Paid apps only
• Peer-to-peer connectivity
  • IP over Bluetooth
  • Standard system panel to find other local iPhones running same app
  • Uses Bonjour
• Accessories
  • Apps will be able to talk directly to them
  • Examples
    • Speaker
    • FM Tuner
    • Blood pressure monitor
  • Over cable or Bluetooth
  • Standard and/or custom protocols
• Maps
  • Now can be embedded in your application
  • Can do turn by turn directions!
  • The catch - can’t use built in maps for turn-by-turn
• Push Notification
  • Delayed due to developer requests for new usage models (hmmm)
  • Still don’t like background processes (kill battery life)
  • Seems like previously announced architecture
• Video & Audio
  • New streaming API for video and audio
  • New API for in-game voice
• Other things on the SDK slide
  • In app email
  • Data Detectors
  • Shake API
  • iPod Library Access
  • Proximity sensor
  • Open URL
  • Battery API
  • GPS Lingo
• “2-week” examples
  • What can someone do in 2-weeks with the new SDK?
  • Meebo (IM)
    • Showed chat and push notification
  • EA (games)
    • 10 iPhone games so far
    • “The Sims”
      • In-game purchases
  • Oracle
    • iSnooze
  • ESPN
    • Alerts
    • Streaming video (auto adjusts to available bandwidth)
  • LifeScan (Johnson & Johnson)
    • Diabetes testing
    • Diet calculations
  • ngmoco (games)
    • TouchPets
      • In-game purchases
    • LiveFire (Multiplayer First Person Shooter)
      • In-game chat
  • Smule (Ocarina)
    • Leaf Trombone (multiplayer music app)

New user features

• Cut, Copy & Paste!
  • Double tap to select
  • Slide to grab more text
  • Pop up has “Cut|Copy|Paste”
  • Shake to undo (at least in Safari)
  • Send multiple pictures and paste into e-mail
• Landscape in Mail, Notes, SMS
• SMS
  • Forward & Delete Multiple Messages
  • MMS (3G only)
  • Can add contacts, photos, audio you receive
• Voice memos
• 2 new Calendar types (CalDAV, ?)
• Stocks
  • News stories & details
  • Landscape view
• Search
  • Mail!
  • Calendar!
  • iPod Library!
  • Search everything from Spotlight app - nice!
  • Flick past leftmost homescreen to get to spotlight
  • Can run apps from spotlight (yea! no more “lost” apps!)
• Other new features (from Apple slide)
  • Notes Sync
  • Auto-fill
  • Parental controls
  • Shake to Shufle
  • WiFi auto login
  • Stereo Bluetooth (YYYYYEEEEEESSSSSS!) (3G only)
  • Anti-phising
  • YouTube accounts
  • VPN on demand
  • Call log
  • Live streaming
  • Create meeting invitations
  • Audio/Video Tags
• “Missing” features
  • Background apps
  • Video recording
  • Flash
  • Bluetooth sync
  • Tethering

Developer beta available today!

Available to end users in June

• Free for iPhone
• $9.95 for iPod touch

App Store

• 15 new countries
• 77 total countries

Q&A

• Why no flash?
  • Can’t tell us
• Will peer to peer work with other devices?
  • It’s limited to Bonjour (so, Macs, I guess?)
  • No file or music sharing
• Tethering?
  • Apple is building support in.  
  • Sounds like carriers make the decision
• Push notification uptime guarantees?
  • No
• Addressing current OS “lagginess” problems?
  • Definitely
• Could you serve audio files over bluetooth, could you move them?
  • Very unsure “probably not”
• Approval process
  • There have been issues, e.g. content available to children.
  • Working with developers to improve it.

Thanks to engadget.com and cnet.com for their live blogs!