This Week's Sponsor:

Copilot Money

The Apple Editor’s Choice Award App for Tracking Your Money. Start Your Free Trial Today

Posts tagged with "iOS"

Pioneer Introduces AppRadio with Powerful iOS Integration

Initially surfaced last month through some FCC filings and rumored to be the first in-car radio to sport full iOS integration with iPhone apps and iPod out music controls, Pioneer officially announced the AppRadio today, with a dedicated iPhone app already available on the App Store for free. With a 800 x 400 6.1-inch multitouch capacitive display, Bluetooth connectivity and possibility to plug directly into an iPhone or iPod touch 4th gen running Pioneer’s software, the AppRadio will not only get usual access to your music library with album artwork and song information visualized on screen (BMW apparently already does that), it will also be capable of letting you interact with iOS calendars, maps, contacts and photos using the touchscreen device. It seems like Pioneer went all out to enable deep iOS integration, so much that certain applications available on the App Store, like Pandora and Rdio, have already announced AppRadio-specific versions with controls meant for the bigger display. On top of that, the AppRadio features a nice digital clock, an on-screen week calendar, a mic, external GPS antenna and a price tag below $500 when it goes on sale at the end of June.

From the press release:

Pioneer is rethinking connectivity by tapping into the power of the smartphone, while simultaneously providing a solution that safely merges the consumer’s connected lifestyle into the vehicle,” said Ted Cardenas, director of marketing for the car electronics division of Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. “AppRadio fully embraces the iPhone, which has become the window to our mobile connectivity and provides a comprehensive and safer way to use apps in the car.

There’s more: the AppRadio recognizes multitouch gestures like swipes, pinch and zoom, and the companion iPhone app will alert you of new AppRadio-compatible 3rd party apps as they’re released. iOS 4.2 or later will be required for the AppRadio to work with an iPhone or iPod touch. [via Engadget]

Prototypes Turns Mockups Into Tappable iPhone Demoes

If you’re an iPhone developer, you know how long it takes to turn a mockup realized in Photoshop, Illustrator or Fireworks into a working app that can be tested to see if your idea is actually working on a device’s screen. Whilst an app screen may look good in Photoshop with its fancy graphics and menus you first sketched on your notebook, there’s always the risk that, once running on a real device with an actual multitouch display, your idea will simply suck. Prototypes, a new Mac app released today at $39.99, is a new tool for developers aimed at making the process of converting a mockup into a tappable and shareable application super-simple. Prototypes won’t magically turn your .png’s into Cocoa code, instead it will allow you to display these images on an iPhone or iPod touch screen, and allow users to tap around and get the idea of how an app works.

From Prototypes’ desktop view, developers can import image files and start building a new project. Once all the images are in, Prototypes offers the possibility to create connections and links between objects and pages, add tappable areas and establish dependencies between app menus and sections. What Prototypes basically does is simple: it takes all your app mockups you’ve created in Photoshop, bundles them up in a package, and takes care of including animations, transitions, hotspots, and more to give users the feeling that they’re using a real application while, in fact, they’re just tapping on “smart images” connected by links. It’s genius. Of course you won’t end up using an app on your phone – you’ll simply be running a bookmark saved from the web that’s nothing but a living mockup meant for testing purposes.

Prototypes also offers developers a way to share these mockups with users, their boss, or friends: by hosting a mockup on the free ptyp.es service, devs will be able to easily allow everyone to “install the app” using Mobile Safari and a special PIN code for extra security. You can try one of Prototypes smart mockups by heading over this link with your iPhone, saving the page on your Home screen, and entering 12345678 as PIN.

I think Prototypes is an incredible idea and a great time-saving utility for iOS developers that have been looking for ways to test a mockup without actually writing code. You can get the app here at $39.99.

Rumor: iPhone 3GS Won’t Get iOS 5

With Apple wrapping up its software announcements for the WWDC set to kick off in San Francisco on June 6, a new rumor suggests the two-year old iPhone 3GS won’t get the iOS 5 upgrade when Apple releases the first betas this summer and the final version of the OS likely this Fall. According to Russian analyst and Mobile Review editor Eldar Murtazin, the 2009 iPhone 3GS will stay on iOS 4, thus leaving the iPhone 4 and next-generation device Apple is scheduled to announce later this year as the only iPhone models capable of running iOS 5. Murtazin wrote in a tweet posted earlier today:

Just one comment. Apple iPhone 3Gs wont be upgradable to iOS 5.x. iPhone 4 will.

No additional details are provided by Murtazin in his Twitter timeline, leaving room for much speculation in regards to reliability of the rumor. When Apple released iOS 4 in summer 2010, for example, the company made sure it could run on the iPhone 3G, 3GS and iPhone 4. It was only with the first beta of iOS 4.3 (seeded in January) that Apple dropped support for the iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2nd gen – older devices the software team at Cupertino thought wouldn’t be capable of running the latest versions of iOS anymore. And again, Apple “unofficially” confirmed they were dropping support for the original 2007 iPhone in 2010, when Steve Jobs replied to a customer email and said Apple wouldn’t update the original iPhone in the future. Indeed, the 2007 iPhone can’t run iOS 4.

At this point, it’s unclear whether or not the iPhone 3GS will receive an upgrade to iOS 5, though Apple’s history seems to indicate that an iPhone lifespan varies from two to two years and a half. A report posted by 9to5mac earlier this month claimed that Apple was internally testing iOS 5 on the iPhone 3GS, although the website suggested that it wasn’t “immediately clear” whether the 3GS would eventually get the public version of iOS 5.

The iPhone 3GS was introduced on June 8, 2009, at the WWDC in San Francisco. It was released on June 19 in the United States, Canada and six more European countries, featuring faster performances with 256 MB of RAM, better camera with video capabilities, voice control and digital compass. The device is still available on Apple’s website at a discounted price of $49 for the 8 GB version. The iPhone 3GS runs the latest iOS 4.3.3, though the difference in performances is notable when compared to A4 and A5-enabled devices like the iPhone 4 and iPad 2.

[Thanks, Kevin]

Facebook for iPhone Creator Tries to Improve Scrolling in iOS Web Apps

Joe Hewitt, creator and former developer of the Facebook app for iPhone, announced earlier this month his intention to leave the company to focus on personal projects to build tools for designers, programmers, and writers. The first result of his renewed development efforts is Scrollability, “a single script” that has no “external dependencies” and it’s aimed at dramatically improving scrolling on mobile web applications. One of the biggest problems of web apps, in fact, when compared to native iOS applications, is that web apps usually suffer from bad scrolling performances and an overall feeling of “slowness” that most App Store apps don’t have because of the tools and frameworks they were written with.

On the official project’s page, Hewitt explains Scrollability works best on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad. Once implemented on a webpage (by adding a few “CSS classes to scrollable elements”), the effects of Scrollability can be immediately noticed thanks to a general snappier and more responsive scrolling than regular iOS web apps. For now there’s only a Table View demo out, and you can try it by heading over this link with your iOS device.

Hewitt also details some of the changes that are being worked on:

Bugs Being Worked On

  • Increase momentum as you flick up or down several times
  • When releasing finger slowly, make sure scrolling is completely stopped
  • Lots of other hard to describe discrepancies with native scrolling…

Features Planned

  • Scroll to the top when status bar is tapped
  • Option to snap to page boundaries
  • Sticky table headers
  • Photo viewer with zooming

Scrollability is available on GitHub, and you can follow Hewitt’s Twitter account to stay updated with the latest changes and modifications to the script. With the improvements introduced in Mobile Safari after the iOS 4.3 software update, there’s a huge opportunity for web developers to write apps for iPhones and iPads that don’t require Apple’s approval; Joe Hewitt’s project may become obsolete as soon as next month when Apple previews iOS 5, but it’s still worth checking it out now and testing it on mobile web pages. [via ReadWriteWeb]