Is it me, or Apple? The recently (a few hours ago) announced 3G iPhone was stated to be thinner version of the current model. But a close look at the tech specs on the Apple store site indicate that it is actually .48 inches (12.3mm) thick while the previous version was only .46 (11.6mm) thick.
The difference in the new iPhone design is that the edges appear to be more sculpted like a Mac Book Air, thus the phone probably “feels” thinner, when in reality it is thicker.
Well it looks like i have been accepted into the iPhone SDK beta developer program.. I must say that thus far the experience has been far more like a Microsoft Beta than anything else, where you are made to feel privileged to have been accepted after jumping through a corporate bureaucracy.
I am not sure how widespread the program is now, potentially they are allowing everyone in. What was odd though, is that last week I got an email requesting faxed copies of my articles of incorporation for BrightPoint Consulting (the company I registered under) which I faxed over. Just a few moments ago (a week later) I receive an email telling me that upon signing the license agreement and forking over my $99 I would be enrolled. I promptly did both, and now I am an “official” iPhone developer. I find it odd that it required such a manual process… I would assume this is pretty manually intensive if they are having humans read and correlate faxes to each developer account.
Last week I downloaded the latest bits from the second release of the iPhone SDK beta. I see that Interface Builder is now included, which is supposed to be the “magic sauce” for creating UI’ s in Cocoa applications. But as I had thought, it still requires quite a bit of work to set up an application. The good news is that it appears that there is finally some documentation on the JavasScript DOM api for touch/gesture events. I planned on exploring that a bit further when I could carve out some time.
I will post again when I receive the SDK if there are additional resources provided outside of what everyone else see, and if my sharing does not violate some license EULA.
Here is why I won’t be writing native iPhone Applications: (at least not yet)
After spending about 40+ hours with the new iPhone SDK, getting up to speed on Objective-C (which is kinda cool) and modifying a few sample apps with XCode I have come to realize that while Apple makes amazing consumer products and interfaces, they fall completely short of the mark when it comes to developer tooling interfaces. Perhaps it is because I do NOT come from the land of Unix (well okay I used Unix in University, but that was over 20 years ago) and I am not a huge proponent of the command line and I prefer nice comfortable IDE’s like Visual Studio or Eclipse that I don’t see the magic here.
Just watch the video above to witness what kind of gyrations, both in code and UI, you need to go through to wire up a button to make a beeping noise. Windows popping up all over, connecting objects from one window to another with visual lines… opaque NIB files, etc. I am sure compared to command line C++ development this might seem like a godsend, but for someone who has spent the last 2 years developing almost exclusively with Adobe Flex, this seems like a step back into the stone ages. While I am not a huge fan of Microsoft, Visual Studio really sets the bar for a highly productive and functional IDE, Eclipse is getting better and almost there. When it comes to programming languages to create expressive and immersive UI’s there is no beating flex.
I am so eager to develop immersive multi-touch applications on such an amazing device as the iPhone that I have seriously considered investing the 90 days or so I think it would take to develop a modicum of proficiency on new tooling (XCode) and language (Objective-C). But when I look at how pleasurable the experience of developing with these tools would be it looks like it would be trying to go surfing on a huge 100lb redwood board versus the 6lb epoxy short boards I prefer. While I would still be catching waves, things would feel so ponderous and slow. I thought that perhaps I am just missing it, and I needed to shift my mental paradigm to a different one so I would “get-it”. After watching the video above, I am not sure that I am missing anything.
Obviously an ideal dev platform for me would be having the iPhone support Flash with Multi-touch so I could develop in flex, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Especially considering the restrictions in the SDK. The one nuggets I did find in doing my research was that one of the SDK videos talked about the Javascript extensions they were building and the new CSS standards they were supporting. Some of the glimpses I got were:
Gesture support via Javascript (gestureStart, gestureEnd…)
CSS Animations
Transitions
Full SVG support and drawing (although not sure if that is restricted to markup or can be dynamic.)
Javascript access to SQLite !!! (this is huge in my mind as it could really allow online/offline apps)
The challenge I have though is that I can’t find ANY documentation to support those javascript API’s. I am thinking that perhaps creating web-apps with these javascript API’s will afford me the ability to use more productive tooling and get the same great features. I just need to figure out how/if the SDK will allow us to support web apps running in an offline state, and if it will be possible to sell web-apps via the AppStore.
Well, I am pretty impressed with the level of effort that went into this SDK. I am on day four of just looking around, and I have yet to write a single line of code, which is very uncharacteristic of me.
The SDK is pretty polished, with custom graphics, and a deep set of well put together videos (available via Apple Developer Connection) free on iTunes. The videos were a great way to get a lay of the land.
Other than starting to get my mind around Objective C after spending the last two plus years immersed in Adobe Flex feels like a bit of a step backwards. I am not super fond of the C/C++ structures and coding paradigms, as they feel like I am having to do a bunch of unnecessary work at lower levels of abstraction that is needed. Having to deal with memory allocations and stuff like that is a bit of PIA, but perhaps it is just because I have been working in higher level languages for so long.
One interesting bit I ran across in the videos is that they have extended the javascript API for Web Kit to support the handling of multi-touch getsure events like gesturestart, gestureend, and gesturechange. But I have been unable to find any other documented API references to this, and in loading up Dashcode (their web IDE for the iPhone) I could not get any more info.
