Tag: Developer

Apple Seeds iPhone OS 3.1 Beta 3 To Developers

Apple has released iPhone OS 3.1 Beta 3 (build 7C116a) and the iPhone SDK 3.1 Beta 3 (build 9M2808) to developers. So far there are no interesting developments that have been found, though it is suspected that Apple might be implementing tools for use in Augmented Reality applications that require the ability to overlay real-time downloaded data on top of live video.

iPhone OS & SDK 3.1 Beta

The new features include:
• Copy and paste videos. There is a 15 MB limit for copying/pasting videos or images.
• Tethering Counter – If you go to Settings -> Genral -> Usage on your iPhone, you’ll notice Tethering data which shows how much tethering you’ve used.
• Springboard Icons – When you hold down the Springboard icons they no longer vibrate.
• Baseband Updated – The baseband has been updated to 05.11.04.
• Camera API Additions.

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Apple Seeds iPhone OS 3.1 Beta 2 To Developers

Yesterday Apple provided iPhone developers with Beta 2 of the OS 3.1 firwamre. This release didn’t mention any changes, although the first beta included minor feature adjustments without Apples mentioning. Beta 2 will most likely contain bug fixes which address issues in Beta 1. Along with this a updated version of the iPhone SDK for both Leopard and Snow Leopard have been also released.

3.1 Beta 2

If your using Beta 2 and notice any changes feel free to leave a comment.

Update: I’ve just found that beta 2 also introduces a public API for manipulating live video. Developers are still testing the capabilities but it could open the door for many interesting apps in the near future.

Apple Announces 1.5 Billion Downloads In App Store

Apple announced yesterday that they have had a total of 1.5 billion app downloads on just over 65,000 apps. There App Storeare currently 40 million iPhones and iPod Touches that are able to run the App Store, and over 100,000 developers registered in the iPhone Developer program making all these apps.

Apple today announced that customers have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications in just one year from its revolutionary App Store, the largest applications store in the world. The App Store is also growing at an incredible pace with more than 65,000 apps and more than 100,000 developers in the iPhone? Developer Program.

“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”

Developers Continue To Fight Piracy

As the iPhone user-base increases, so does the piracy user-base of iDevices. Many developers have been or are now implementing features to stop piracy of their apps. You will have read how BeejiveIM stopped working for pirated copies, now Spokko, the makers of Light Wars have also implemented a feature that stops pirated copies from working.

Spokko Pirate Version

This has only been implemented into the new update but from what I know the original 1.0 release will not stop pirates using it, it’s interesting to see how developers are taking different methods to stop piracy.

Stack v3 Alpha Review Coming Soon

If your an iPhone owner you will of most likely have heard of, or used one of Steve Troughton-Smith’s app’s at some point or at least heard of them. He was the one who worked out how to tether the iPhone months ago.

He currently has 6 projects listed on his official website some of which are App Store approved, others are available via Cydia, however a project he’s been working on a lot recently is the Stack app, which gives the iPhone and dock like Stack feature. The new v3 has a lot of things to look forward to and the early alphas are promising, I’ve got hold of the alpha earlier and will be writing up a full review over the weekend.

Stack v3 Alpha

Developers Continue to Fight Piracy!

As I have said in preview posts, I believe that we should as users get to try before you buy on Apps from Apple’s App Store, so as a result I do use the cracked method to try out Apps; however I test them for a few days and if I like them and think they work well, then I will purchase them. As a student I don’t have much money to be spending on loads of Apps such as the amount as I do now so I buy what I like and delete what I don’t.

However as I wrote before Beejive IM began to stop pirates using there App, but today I tried the Camera Zoom App from KendiTech and got a trial expired screen:

Camera Zoom Trial Screen

As you can see the developer has now implemented a system so that it can tell if the App has been pirated.
Now I agree that developers should do this seeing as this App is very cheap to buy from the store and obviously it’s supporting these hard working developers. But it brings an interesting note, developers should allow full versions with trial periods of say a week or a few days so that the user’s can get a taste of the App before spending there money and leaving bad reviews.

iPhone Idea: Memory

The iPhone and iPod Touch are an amazing platform for App’s. From twitter clients to full feature games. Most of these work perfectly without a hitch but when it comes to some App’s, especially Photography App’s then it’s a different story.
Photo App’s usually use a lot more memory than other App’s and frequently go over the limit of RAM it’s allowed to use causing the iPhone to close it.

Using App’s such as System we can clean up the memory and free up a lot of free space, which some people achieve via re-booting. What would be a lot better is if you have an App that needs a lot of memory clean it up before you start the App. Maybe Apple should implement a memory cleaner which works in the background when it realises a certain amount of memory is being used that cleans it up.

Here’s a screenshot of System, an App for the iPhone/iPod Touch that free’s up memory.

System_1
System_2
As you can see System freed up about 39MB of RAM making App’s which are memory intensive work a lot better.
For a better user experience either the developers or Apple should implement this feature.

iPhone Developer Denys ‘Jailbroken’ Support

I was recently having a problem exporting a picture from the Private Pics app, so I emailed the support team to ask them where abouts the image files were stored on the phone so that I could manually access them, as I know that encryption of these is currently not allowed by Apple; and I have a jailbroken iPhone so can use WinSCP and OpenSSH to access the file system.
I recieved a reply as follow:

My suggestion is to export again.

I’m sorry, but Apple has recently stated that their consider jailbreaking their devices to be illegal, and I am unable to provide support for a jailbroken iPhone or iPod.

Dreaming Phone Support

It seem’s that since Apple stated jailbraking as illegal iPhone Devs are not giving support, this may just be an isolated case but still if someone has a problem with a product that you created you should help them, right?