Apple Music Event, Everything iOS!

The question that we developers are always asking ourselves after such an Apple event: “what was in it for us?” There are the highlights relevant to us:

• iOS 4.1 release is imminent, if not today then this week. GameCenter being released, update your games! Ah and you don’t need any HDR app any more, the iPhone shots 3 images at the same time and combines them. Groovy!
• iOS 4.2 coming in November, for all devices being able to run 4.x, but the main focus is to bring all the 4.0 niceties to iPad: Multitasking, Folders, etc. And the best new feature for productivity apps: Wireless Printing!
• There are 230,000 iOS devices being activated every day, NOT including updates. Steve kind of hinted that the number that Google mentioned is not really honest in that regard.
• The new iPod Nano is square indeed and clearly runs iOS. For the time being Apple does not give us ability to code apps for the small screen, but that might be coming eventually.
• New iPod Touch is now an iPhone 4 without the phone. Retina display, Gyroscope, A4 Chip. Even more reason to update your artwork and add a 2x version for all images. And since the iPod Touch now has two cameras any apps making use of AV capture devices has a way bigger audience
• New Apple TV is now at a price point reachable for everybody. The previous Apple TV was running an old OSX version, this new version clearly is iOS based, also because it has an A4 chip. But just like the Nano, no third party apps (yet?). It does not have storage though, so where would you store apps?
• One of the new things in iOS 4.2 will be AirPlay which allows HD videos to be streamed from you iDevices straight to your AppleTV. Do we see a wireless UIScreen that we can do the same from our apps in 4.2?
• New social music service directly in iTunes 10. You see which music your friends like. How about adding the same for apps?

So half of the news is great for us, more iOS devices that we can develop for with new tech. And more iOS devices that we WILL be able to develop for. Everything points to Apple wanting to keep enough news to themselves to not over-excite us iOS developers.

BUT! (one more thing) I foresee another Apple event happening at the beginning of 2011 filling all the above mentioned holes.

Apple Store Down

Update: of course I meant to say that the “Apple Store” is down, not the “App Store”.

Every time the App Store Apple Store goes down the world gasps with excitement. New Macs? Any hardware refreshes?

Here’s a script that you can execute at the command line that will notify you as soon as the store is back up. I found this script here and modified it to use the built-in say command instead of growlnotify which I did not have.

#! /bin/bash
 
until [ 1 -eq 2 ]
do
        echo -n "Checking ..."
        MYVAR=`curl -s http://store.apple.com/us | grep backsoon | grep australia`
        if [ "$MYVAR" == "" ]
        then
                if [ ! -f "/tmp/storeup.txt" ];
                then
                        echo "UP!"
                        say "The Store is up!"
                        echo "1" > /tmp/storeup.txt
                        exit
                fi
        else
                echo "down"
        fi
 
        sleep 10
done

To use it just paste this script into a file storecheck, make it executable and run it in terminal. This runs an endless loop and as soon as the store is up will say “The Store is up!”.

iOS 4.0.1 Bar Analysis

Being the experimenting kind I took screenshots of my iPhone 4 status bar before and after updating the software/firmware to 4.0.1.

In the Unofficial Apple Testing Labs (which double as my house) I have my summer office in a “back room”. This is at the back of my house due to lesser temperatures. So I was able to test a high db as well as a low db scenario. Note that this is regular GSM/EDGE connections, I don’t get 3G where I live.

The “Death Grip” was performed by cupping the left hand around the bottom of the phone making sure to touch the black strip with the base of my thumb.

You can actually feel how much stronger the reception is with fewer bars. See how much larger they are?

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iPhone 4 Landing in Austria

It’s one of these days there the arrival of a new and shiny Apple toy is diminishing productivity to zero. My iPhone 4 arrived at lunchtime and so I spent my afternoon unboxing and setting up my new iDevice.

I had purchased a black 32 GB iPhone 4 on Apple’s UK store. The kingdom is a tier 1 country which got it at the same time as the US. What’s also great is that the empire’s Apple online store sells the variant without SIM-lock. A necessity if you want to be able to use the iPhone 4 as a phone in your home cellular network. Since I ordered Apple added this paragraph to clarify this:

When you purchase your iPhone from the Apple Online Store, you’ll get it SIM-free. So you can sign up for service with the carrier of your choice and change your carrier at any time

My friend Michael Kaye in London purchased the phone for me (32 GB for 599 GBP) and shipped it via parcel service to Austria. This cost me another 60 pounds, but I had insurance and tracking. The latter was kind of weird, because the original carrier Parcelforce handed off the package to FedEx and so I got incomplete and somewhat strange tracking info. But fortunately it turned out fine.

I’m unboxing the iPhone after the back, check out my YouTube video!

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SteveNote (Quasi) Live

Like every good follower I shall be glued to my big iMac to listen read the latest news from Steve Jobs when he takes the stage at the WWDC 2010 keynote. Somebody called my a “FanBoi”. But I’d rather be a FanBoy than a Fan of a Boygroup.

Apple is always extremely protective of their resources. So they just won’t exert any efforts in streaming the event but rather post a stream a couple of hours later on apple.com and add it to the Apple Keynotes Podcast even a few hours after that. But that does not mean that you have to wait for the info. The web is your friend.

UPDATE: Send me your Skype name. We’ve established a skype chat channel and there’s already a lively conversation in progress.

Here are some sites that have a proven track record (for me) of relaying what’s going on. I will plaster my 27″ iMac and my 15″ MacBook Pro with these.

• Engadget live – Great Live Blog with Photos
• Gizmodo Live – Usually head to head with Engadget on the frequency of updates and photos
• TWIT Live – Leo Laporte is broadcasting live and if there’s any live video or audio then he’ll get it
• MacRumors.com Live – they formatted their live bloggingsite ideally for iPhone/iPad

Other Liveblogs (as recommended by Gizmodo) to take your pick from: gdgt, Ars Technica, Wired, Technologizer,NYT, Mac Life, and Apple Insider.

I won’t be making an effort to relay the info, because so many other people are doing that. But I’ll be making notes as to which things are of especial interest and importance to us iPhone developers.

Candid Steve Jobs at D8

Steve Jobs is one of the most interesting guests of Malt Mossberg at his All Things Digital D8 Conference. There is a summary of his Q&A session available, but the most interesting parts are the videos they posted. I compiled them into one overview here so that you don’t have to search for them and provided a summary for each.

iPhone

Steve had the idea for a tablet without keyboard first and ordered his engineers to develop a glass multi-touch display. When they came back to him and showed him the inertial scrolling and rubberbanding he got the inspiration to do a phone first. So they shelved the iPad and later “when they got their wind back” returned to it and used what they learned on the iPhone.

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Apple Q1 2010 Conference Call Summary

These are my notes for a quick summary of what was interesting for us iPhone Developers.

iPhone Sales

• over 8.7 Million iPhones sold in Quarter
• = Company Record
• = 100% increase over prior December quarter
• 17 new carriers
• iPhone now in 68 countries

Apple generally focussed on cash generation and “short dated high quality investments”.

New Accounting Principles applied retroactively: No longer revenue/cost deferred for future updates. Apple has a tax rate of about 29%.

Apple very satisfied with their “New Product” Pipeline. 33% Mac Growth Rate (= 2 times the market) “very confident about the pipeline”

Q&A

What are their feelings on having a single carrier in the US?

AT&T is a “great partner”, worked with them since well before iPhone. “Some issues in a few cities”, AT&T has “detailed plans to address these”

Development of prices

• higher component prices environment (DRAM, other components overcapacity depleted)
• seasonal decline in revenue
• US dollar strengthened

App Review Process Problems

Important to keep perspective: 100.000 apps, 90% apps approved within 14 days. Make sure it protected consumer privacy, children. Porn rejected outright. Rejections are mostly bugs. Noise higher than reality.

About future products

“Stay Tuned.”

“Wouldn’t want to take away your joy of surprise on Wednesday.”

App Store

Way ahead of competitors. Dwarfing them.

Lala, Quattro Acquisitions:

Offer seamless way for app developers to make more money, for technology and talent.

About relationship with Google

“We work with Google work with in some areas, compete in others. Mobile Ads in infancy. We’ll see where that takes us.”

Education

“We really understand teaching and learning and student achievement at a very deep level. And I think we’re the only technology company that really gets it. We sell a lot more than just boxes as many other people do. I think we are staying very focussed on that market.”

iSlate Videos

It’s just 10 days before an (unconfirmed) Apple event where most of the IT world expects for Apple to announce a new form factor. I have to admit, the fascination has also gripped me and so I’ve compiled the best YouTube videos for your viewing pleasure. All interspersed with a couple of the best links where I found these things.

From still images to videos, Dean Johnson has a post Breathing Life into Apple’s Tablet

Let’s begin with a funny spoof: The iSlate if it would have been invented 2010 BC.

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Waiting for Daily Reports

A developer based in the USA would probably never have to wait for the previous day’s sales report. But the iPhone app selling business being a global operation all EMEA and even more so APAC countries have to wait for a while until they can see how they are doing. That’s why I started to collect data on when a daily sales report usually becomes available so that I might be able to see a pattern or draw any interesting conclusions from that.

You might remember that I added anonymous availability reporting to MyAppSales 1.0.10. This way whenever a new report is encountered I am able to send out a push notification and automatically post it to the MyAppSales Twitter feed. The theory was that Apple would not make daily reports available at different times around the globe, but just have a single database that treats all developers the same. After a couple of days testing this hypothesis it was proven correct. In the beginning I was often myself the first person to see a report and thus trigger the notification. But very soon it started to happen that colleagues started to consistently beat me to the punch, be it either because they where more eager to get the report or just because the number of people with newer versions of MyAppSales exploded as I added more and more compelling features.

Now after 2 months Thomas Bonnin (thanks!) suggested to do an analysis, so I created a CSV file for the daily availability times for the past 2 months and Thomas kindly created these two charts from it. Bear in mind that the detection granularity grew over time, so at the beginning of this report the actual availability times might have been actually a bit lower.

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Forbidden Fruit in Apple’s APIs

Apple appears to be cracking down on apps these days which are not sticking to the SDK agreement when it comes to using undocumented (read “private”) APIs. I’m attempting to make a list here, so if you have received the usual slap on the wrist for actually using one of the undocumented “features” to make it easier on yourself then please let me know so that I can add it here.

The problem with these undocumented API calls is that up until now Apple did not seem to uniformly care if they where to be found in submitted apps. But lately the reviewers seem to have gotten a static analyzer into their hands. With the help of which they can dump all the method names in your app so they will see if you are naughty or nice.

The official statement is that Apple is working on making more and more undocumented API public. They claim that those APIs are not properly tested and will probably change between OS versions thus breaking apps that rely on them. We’ll see if some of these following methods will eventually really become public.

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