Four Huge Changes You Need to Know About iPhone OS 4
Just hours ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs (we’ve heard of him) announced several exciting changes to the iPhone platform. Dubbed iPhone OS 4, this update will bring some awesome new features to iPhone owners sometime this summer. You can catch up on all of the changes here, but three four of them are super important for iPhone app developers and testers.
1. Multitasking
Implementing multitasking on the iPhone has always been a challenge. Having too many apps running at the same time can reduce battery life, and managing several apps at once can be a drag on such a small device. But there has always been a need for some apps to stick around and keep running while the user is doing other things. Apple is taking care of this by offering multitasking “services” – seven of them in all.
Starting with OS 4, you will be able to take advantage of rudimentary multitasking for features like audio, VOIP, and location. The new OS will also support “freezing” your app when the user switches away and then restoring it when the user switches back. Finally, a new service will help your app finish up time intensive tasks while the user moves along to something else (the example given was finishing up a photo upload).
The rest of the details on how this works are murky, but iPhone app developers can download the SDK today and start figuring it out. Let us know what you discover – inquiring minds want to know.
2. New APIs
Developers have been asking for a lot of API features, especially improved access to the iPhone’s video systems. OS 4 adds a number of APIs that will make it easier to develop apps that can do everything from displaying intelligent maps to dissecting video from the built-in camera.
And for the mathematically inclined developers out there (I’m looking at you game people), Apple is including a whole bunch of fancy new math functions that will make it easy to combine matrices with other matrices (and even vectors, if you’re into that kind of thing).
3. Automated testing
Whoa, whoa! Automated testing on a touchscreen device? Yup. Apple is introducing UIAutomation, an automated testing system that will be built-in to the their dev tools. So get your automation hats ready to go, because soon you’ll be able to script up fake fingerprints all over your app’s UI.
And when you’re ready for your new iPhone app to have some testing in the wild, we know a great mobile app testing company.
4. Apple blocks Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone tool
Daring Fireball is now reporting that the language of the Developer Program License Agreement has changed. Apple now mandates that you must develop for the iPhone using Objective C, C, C++, and Javascript only. That means you cannot use Adobe’s upcoming Flash-to-iPhone app compiler.
