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Posts tagged with "developers"

Apple Announces iOS 5 Tech Talk World Tour 2011

Earlier this year, Apple was rumored to be considering a new edition of the Tech Talk World Tour, a series of developer-focused events in different cities to provide developers with additional sessions, trainings and answers to common questions outside of the typical WWDC environment. Apple has just announced the new iOS 5 Tech Talk World Tour, which will take place in nine cities this year:

We’re taking iOS 5 on a world tour and we want you to come along for the ride. Learn from Apple experts as you take your apps to the next level with the exciting new technologies in iOS. Space is limited, so register today.

The Tech Talk World Tour will start in November, and run through the end of January. The nine cities that will host the event are:

  • Berlin - November 2
  • London - November 7
  • Rome - November 9
  • Beijing - December 5
  • Seoul - December 8
  • Sao Paolo - January 9
  • New York City - January 13
  • Seattle - January 18
  • Austin - January 23

As Apple notes, all iOS Developer Program members are eligible to attend, however priority will be given to developers with at least an app available on the App Store. Tech Talk World Tour sessions are “highly technical”, Apple explains, as a team of expert will travel around the world covering advanced coding and design techniques that developers can implement in their apps.

Tech Talk is free and developers can register with their existing Dev account, however they can’t bring guests as registration is limited to those who got a confirmation email from Apple. Each Tech Talk will share the same agenda and sessions listed on Apple’s website, and developers can’t register for more than one city as Apple wants “to give as many developers as possible the opportunity to attend a Tech Talk”. Apple also states that pre-release software may be covered at Tech Talk, so developers will have to follow the iOS Developer Program License Agreement and Registered Apple Developer Agreement to not share confidential information.

Topics that will be covered in each Tech Talk session include iPhone and iPad User Interface Design, AirPlay, UIKit, Turn-Based Gaming with Game Center, AV Foundation, Core Image and Newsstand apps. Developers can register for Tech Talk World Tour 2011 on Apple’s official page for the event.

Apple to Developers: Submit Your iOS 5 and iCloud Apps Today

Following the release of the Golden Master seed of iOS 5, Apple has updated its developer portal with a new “iOS 5 Readiness Checklist”, asking developers to start submitting apps written specifically with the iOS 5 SDK. The checklist includes links to the iOS 5 SDK release notes, Xcode 4.2 for developers, and obviously detailed explanations of the various functionalities that will be introduced in iOS 5, such as Twitter integration, Newsstand, iCloud data storage, and more. Developers can head over this page to check out Apple’s resources for developing and submitting iOS 5 apps.

The next generation of the world’s most advanced mobile operating system will soon be in the hands of hundreds of millions of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch customers. Test your existing apps for compatibility and submit your new apps that take advantage of the exciting technologies in iOS 5 today.

The next generation of the world’s most advanced mobile operating system will soon be in the hands of hundreds of millions of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch customers. This major new release features more than 200 new features and an updated SDK with over 1,500 new APIs and developer tools.

Get your apps ready for the next generation of iOS. Install the GM seed of iOS 5 and build your apps with Xcode 4.2 GM seed. Test your existing apps for compatibility, review the iOS Data Storage Guidelines, and submit your new apps that take advantage of the exciting technologies in iOS 5 today.

iOS 5 and iCloud will be officially released on October 12th.

Update: Apple has sent two different email to iOS and Mac developers – the latter asking makers of software for OS X to submit iCloud-compatible apps today. Developers will be able to create apps that keep documents up to date across multiple machines thanks to iCloud, which automatically stores and pushes content to all your devices.

As a Mac Developer Program member you can now download the GM seeds of OS X Lion 10.7.2 and Xcode 4.2 and submit your iCloud enabled apps to the Mac App Store. With iCloud Storage APIs, your apps can store documents and key value data in iCloud. The documents are automatically kept up to date on all devices.

 

iCloud will be available on the next Lion software update, version 10.7.2, which has been seeded as GM today to developers for final testing.

Apple Releases iOS 5, OS X 10.7.2 GM Seeds

Apple has just released the Golden Master (GM) version of iOS 5 to developers. Build 9A334 is now available in the iOS Dev Center. A Golden Master seed of iOS is usually the same version that will ship to the public within a few weeks.

iOS 5 is the next major release of Apple’s mobile operating system for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, bringing new features like PC-Free setup, iCloud, Notification Center and direct Twitter integration to iOS devices. iOS 5 will be released on October 12th. Additionally, Apple has also released the GM seed of OS X 10.7.2, the next software update for OS X Lion that will bring minor features and optimizations and, more importantly, full iCloud support on the desktop.

Sandboxing and App Culture

Andy Ihnatko and Jason Snell have published two articles on Macworld over the weekend, covering the upcoming sandboxing restrictions that Apple will begin enforcing this November for Mac App Store apps (with its possible implications for Apple’s own technologies like AppleScript) and the broader subject of app culture, which in a way is related to sandboxing and might lead to an overly simplified software environment that some people imagined a year ago.

Ihnatko:

But I fret about AppleScript. I’ve come to think of it as a brilliant and infinitely-resourceful friend who’s been working for twenty years at a company that doesn’t seem to appreciate all of his or her contributions. I’m not worried about Apple killing AppleScript outright; I’m worried that the company doesn’t collectively feel like system automation is a feature that’s worth rescuing if the building ever caught on fire. Some day, Apple’s OS engineers will come up with an idea for a new system architecture that delivers a long list of benefits but which will require tons of work to prevent it from breaking AppleScript. And at that point, scripting on the Mac will finally die.

Snell:

Apple getting serious about app security is a good thing. Unfortunately, many of the apps we Mac users have come to know and love over the years require a broad amount of access to the system for a lot of their key functions. Not as much as SuperDuper, say, but still quite a lot. What I’m hearing from some Mac developers is that they may actually have to remove features from their apps, or reduce their functionality, in order to fit them inside Apple’s new sandbox.

Whilst after the Back to the Mac event in October 2010 we feared the Mac App Store’s lack of trials and license migration options for existing customers would kill the ecosystem and, ultimately, cause the Mac App Store to never take off, that hasn’t been the case. Apple is betting heavily on the Mac App Store as the future of digital distribution for desktop software, and it’s doing so by releasing Lion on the App Store, alongside several other apps (at a discounted price). Since January 6, when the Mac App Store opened for business, third-party developers have rushed to release their apps on it (most of the times with discounted prices) and Apple awarded those who did in time at last June’s WWDC. Some developers needed, obviously, to rethink how their apps would work with Apple’s Mac App Store rules.

The issue mentioned by Ihnatko and Snell isn’t a logistic problem with the infrastructure itself, it’s a real technical question that has arisen lately. How much will sandboxing entitlements affect the functionalities of existing apps? An example is the aforementioned 1Password, whose Mac App Store version won’t allow you to keep its database sync file in Dropbox if that folder is not under your User’s directory. The change wasn’t well received, but that’s just the way it works now. Starting November, it’s safe to assume other apps will need to be updated with this kind of tweaks – a restriction here, some documents can’t be accessed there, and so forth.

You can see how sandboxing, security and app culture are related in Apple’s App Store vision. The concept of “app” has evolved over time to indicate a piece of software that does one thing well, and Apple is doubling down on this new idea by enhancing security (which is a good thing) and making sure an app is limited “to just those operations that it needs to perform”. App and security have come full circle.

In the past nine months, the Mac App Store did just fine for the majority of developers without trials and demo versions. Then Apple introduced in-app purchases and delta updates. Every major change creates victims – those who couldn’t settle down in a new environment – and winners, literally. What will be interesting to observe in the upcoming months isn’t sandboxing itself of Apple’s evilness, but the trade-off third-party developers will seemingly have to come to terms with if they want to keep their apps on the Store., with the same degree of power and innovation we’ve become accustomed to in the past decades.

“Universal Save” for iOS Apps

Ted Landau at The Mac Observer covers an issue I’ve mentioned several times in the past, which Apple has partially fixed with the last releases of iOS: saving documents and moving them across apps. Specifically, Landau notes that the lack of a “universal save” option for documents that can be read by third-party apps (PDFs, text files, images) leads to an annoying and pretty much useless duplication of content. Apple has implemented an “Open In…” menu to send files to other apps, but the file that’s being sent is a copy. iOS apps can’t read and modify a source file from a single location.

Currently, iOS does not come close to matching the advantages of Mac OS X here. There is no way to have a unifying folder in iOS that contains related documents from different apps. There is no way to have a document easily opened in different apps, where any changes you make in one app are instantly accessible by all the compatible apps. You can come closer with Dropbox, but closer is not good enough here.

That’s annoying for me, too, as I constantly switch between apps to get my work done, and it’s not like I don’t enjoy trying new ones. This typically leads to some sort of geek frustration – why can’t Apple build an invisible layer that lets Elements edit a text document from Evernote and Pages access the same file?

For Ted and me, yes, being able to avoid file duplication and tedious exporting processes would be nice. But I do wonder how much does Apple care about such functionalities considering the underlying paradigms of iOS and the upcoming iCloud functionalities of iOS 5. For one, Apple really cares about application sandboxing: each app has its own controlled data environment and only a few items can be shared between multiple apps. Apple cares about sandboxing so much that they’re bringing it to the Mac App Store. Would iOS sandboxing allow for a source file to be edited and “saved” by multiple apps? Where does that file belong to, technically? Would iOS apps be able to write specific metadata to it? And what happens if, hypothetically, this “shared” file needs to be pushed back and forth with iCloud?

I’m no iOS developer, but I can see this proposed “universal save” model becoming an issue when on iOS, unlike the Mac, there’s no visible, centralized Finder location to write and read files from. In fact, Ted is right when he says that the convenience of a Mac is being able to create “a folder that will contain all the assorted files needed to put his column together”. That’s made easy by the Finder – but on iOS? Apple allows third-party developers to plug into the Music library or Camera Roll, yet there’s no Apple app to “create text file here” or “save webpage from Safari here”. Again, the lack of an iOS Finder would require “universal save” to work inside any app. iDisk could have been a centralized location for files – it could have even been Apple’s “answer to Dropbox” – but it’s not going to be supported by iCloud.

And then there’s the conceptual issue of an iOS device being the app that you’re using. When you use Pages on an iPad, the iPad is a word processor. When you browse the web with Safari, you’re holding the web in your hands. On a technical level, this app console model is represented by sandboxing and one-way “Open In” menus, and soon iCloud-based documents that allow multiple versions of the same app to access files. Would a “universal save” option somehow break the illusion that you’re holding an app, reminding us that we’re using a device with multiple layers of abstractions including a filesystem?

I don’t know. I believe I’d like this feature in theory, but I wonder if there would also be a considerable trade-off to accept.

The Mac App Store, Two Months After Lion’s Launch→

The Mac App Store, Two Months After Lion’s Launch

Dan Frommer at SplatF takes a look at the Mac App Store, two months after the public debut of OS X Lion:

What we haven’t seen are big moves by companies like Microsoft or Adobe into the Mac App Store. Adobe launched Photoshop Elements in July, and it seems to be doing pretty well, as the no. 7 highest-grossing app. But it’s still not clear if more of the Creative Suite or Microsoft’s Office suite will eventually make it into the Mac App Store.

In general, though, it seems as if app selection is growing nicely. And now that Lion is the default OS installed on new Macs, and as more Mac users upgrade, App Store sales should continue to grow.

You can look at the data on Dan’s blog, but to sum up: average prices are up and there’s less Apple software in the top charts. I’d argue that Apple has been relatively slow with software updates in the summer (before the big wave that hits with iCloud this Fall) and thus committed third-party developers have jumped the charts, but let’s focus on another aspect of the story – availability. Dan notes that big names like Microsoft and Adobe have shown little or no interest in releasing specific Mac App Store versions of their productivity suites. However, with almost 7,000 apps, there’s a high chance you’ll find your new favorite image or text editor in the Mac App Store, which is empowering less popular third-party Mac devs to make their apps available to a greater audience.

That was the point of the Mac App Store all along – to offer a centralized way for any kind of Mac developer to release and easily update apps. Recent releases like the successful launch of 1Password seem to confirm that there’s plenty of room for smaller companies and independent devs in the top charts. I also look forward to the upcoming launch of Pixelmator 2.0 – you may remember version 1.0 earned $1 million on the Mac App Store in the first 20 days (with the promise of a free 2.0 update).

That’s not to say Apple has achieved the perfect formula with the Mac App Store. Delta updates are nice, but there’s still no way for developers to implement easy upgrade options, or free trials (this is true on the iOS App Store as well – meanwhile, Windows Phone 7’s marketplace features free trials alongside “full versions” of apps). Similarly, there should be a better way to browse in-app purchases, or even manage a basic wish list.

I’m looking forward to some possible tweaks and changes in the next weeks, and I’ll check back in two months.

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Mac App Store Gets “Re-Buy Warning” For Apps Already Installed→

Mac App Store Gets “Re-Buy Warning” For Apps Already Installed

While many are still waiting for Apple to implement a basic wish list functionality in the Mac App Store (eight months after its public debut, there’s now a pretty good selection of high-quality software in Apple’s desktop storefront to choose from), Macworld has noticed the Mac App Store will now give you a heads-up before buying apps you already have installed on your computer. This can be particularly useful as a warning if you’re about to purchase an app you had previously downloaded from a developer’s website, out of the Mac App Store.

Though this doesn’t really reduce the pain of having to pay a second time for the same app, it does at least give less savvy users a heads-up before they accidentally buy a program all over again.

You can try this now with an app like OmniFocus, which is available with the same version (1.9.3) both on The Omni Group’s website and the Mac App Store. When the Mac App Store launched in January, the fact that it reported as “Installed” apps downloaded from a web browser caused some confusion among users.

It’s still unclear whether this dialog box requires the same version of an app to be already installed on a Mac (example: 1Password 3.9 is available on the Mac App Store, whereas AgileBits’ website give you access to an older version), but I assume this new “warning” does indeed require the exact same version to be installed, otherwise the Mac App Store version of an app will install alongside apps purchased elsewhere (this already happens if you head over the Purchased tab, and re-download a newer version of an app you already have on your Mac).

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iMessage for OS X To Be Integrated with iChat?

According a series of code strings found by MacRumors in the current version of iChat for OS X Lion, Apple may be building support for the new messaging system first announced at WWDC for iOS 5 devices inside its IM desktop application. The properties found in iChat’s code refer to “read” and “delivery” receipts, two iMessage features that inform users when a message has been read or simply delivered to another device, respectively. These code strings can’t be found in earlier versions of iChat, apparently, and MacRumors believes they can relate to iMessage support being built inside iChat for Lion.

The “timeDelivered” and “timeRead’ fields indicate the tracking of delivery and read receipts for instant messages. These features, however, are not supported in any of iChat’s native messaging protocols, while the same features are offered in Apple’s iMessage protocol. These properties were also not present in previous versions of iChat prior to OS X Lion. We believe the only reason Apple would have added these properties was to build in cross compatibility with their new iMessage protocol.

Ever since its introduction in June, many have wondered whether Apple could support iMessage, a free messaging protocol for iOS devices, on the desktop as well, allowing iOS users to send text messages to Mac users in their Address Book, and vice versa. Unlike FaceTime, iMessage works on both WiFi and 3G, but similarly to Apple’s video-calling solution it’s completely free of charge and works with email addresses and phone numbers – if an iOS user is already in your Address Book and he’s using the same phone number or email, iMessage will work. The service will be iOS 5-only when it launches this Fall, and Apple hasn’t revealed plans for OS X or Windows versions yet. iMessage has been compared to other free messaging solutions, like RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger, or Google’s Huddle.

A few code strings are no confirmation of Apple’s plans to build iMessage for Mac, but if history is of any indication, it would make sense for Apple to support its new app on multiple platforms. Whereas iChat as an app is still nowhere to be seen on iOS, FaceTime as a service was ported to the OS X and later built into every new Mac. For this reason, many are speculating iMessage could follow a similar trend, perhaps as a standalone app, or a service plugin for iChat.

In the past months, a number of fan-made mockups have tried to imagine what an hypothetical iMessage for Mac would look like. Just like the theories floating around, some imagined the service being supported in existing apps like iChat or Mail, others created videos showing iMessage working as a separate app for effortless Mac-iOS communication. Below, we’re embedding an iMessage concept by Jan-Michael Cart.

iMessage is currently available for iOS 5 beta testers, and it’ll publicly launch with iOS 5 and iCloud this Fall.
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TestFlight’s New SDK Brings In-App Updates, Checkpoints, More

In the recent months, TestFlight has become many developers’ favorite way of distributing internal “beta” builds of their iOS applications to testers. Thanks to the over-the-air installation method introduced by Apple in iOS 4, services like TestFlight allow developers to stop worrying about manually sending .ipa files to testers by relying on a unified web interface that collects testers’ UDIDs (deprecated in iOS 5), alongside other device information and app installation data. TestFlight has been largely successful thanks to its ease of use, nicely designed web apps and user adoption – with the release of a new SDK for developers, as noted by TechCrunch, the company aims to take a step further in letting developers access even more data from their testers and beta apps.

The SDK, available here, brings sessions, crash reports and checkpoints to TestFlight-installed apps. This means developers will be able to discover how testers are using their applications, and how far they’re getting thanks to virtual “checkpoints” placed in the app (useful for, say, level-based games, easter eggs or new, unusual interfaces). With in-app updates, beta apps built through TestFlight’s SDK will directly notify users of available updates without the need of checking email for new TestFlight updates. Similarly, in-app questions will enable developers to run small survey directly into their beta apps.

  • Over-The-Air - Painless App Distribution. Send your beta apps over the air with ease. It’s simple, painless, and magical.
  • Team Management - Get everyone on board. Manage devices and create custom distribution lists to selectively send builds over the air.
  • Feedback - Get the memo. Gather more feedback with in app forms and emails, which is all organized in your dashboard.
  • Reports - The Black Box of beta testing. Solve the mystery of beta testing. No longer wonder which testers installed the app, started testing, or opened their email invite. Reports bring transparency to beta testing, all in real time.
  • Checkpoints - Flag down insight. Monitor tester engagement and trigger in-app questions by placing checkpoints throughout your app.
  • Crash Reports - Crash, but don’t burn. Real time reports with environment snapshots, full session activity, and your NSLogs.
  • Enterprise - Enterprise signed IPA’s. The added benefit of unlimited devices with all the TestFlight features, at no charge.
  • In-App Questions - What’s up? Get the answers you need, by asking questions the moment a checkpoint is reached.

The TestFlight SDK allows you to track how beta testers are testing your application. Out of the box we track simple usage information, such as which tester is using your application, their device model/OS, how long they used the application, logs of their test session, and automatic recording of any crashes they encounter.

To get the most out of the SDK we have provided the Checkpoint API.

The Checkpoint API is used to help you track exactly how your testers are using your application. Curious about which users passed level 5 in your game, or posted their high score to Twitter, or found that obscure feature? With a single line of code you can find gather all this information. Wondering how many times your app has crashed? Wondering who your power testers are? We’ve got you covered.

Information gathered by the TestFlight SDK is sent to the web dashboard in real time, or after an app has been put in the background/terminated. The SDK has been in testing with selected developers for some months now, and the new features seem very welcome among the community. Developers using TestFlight include Spotify, Adobe, Marco Arment of Instapaper, The Iconfactory and Halfbrick, not to mention thousands of smaller “indie” devs trying out the service for the first time.

The TestFlight SDK supports Apple’s Enterprise distribution as well, and is available as a free download here.