Categories
Apple

Where Is iPhone OS 2.3?

I’m somewhat perplexed with Apple’s iPhone SW update scheme since 2.0 was released. Apple has been somewhat erratic in it’s feature set and release schedule as of late. 2.0.x was obviously about big bug fixes and performance issues. 2.1.x was also largely bug/performance fixes plus a few enhancements like Genius playlist and usability enhancements. 2.2 was about small enhancements, street view, and bug fixes (mainly for Safari) getting the 2.x platform stable. Apple has been promising a push notification system since 2.0 but has been radio silence as to the status of this feature that developers have been waiting for.

Since 2.2 was released November 21, 2008, there have been no 2.3 seeds released to developers as far as I’m aware of. Apple needs to distribute seeds before a release to give developers a chance to update their applications as appropriate. Leaks are inevitable as various sites love posting this info and with enough developers, the odds of someone breaking NDA is inevitable. Considering there have been no leaks, it’s pretty safe to say 2.3 is either still under heavy development to immature for even a developer seed, or it doesn’t exist.

I suspect Apple has most of it’s engineers working on iPhone OS 3.0 which will likely launch with the next generation of the iPhone this summer. I suspect that’s when push notification will be addressed. Apple will need to give developers at least 2 months to play with it partially to shake out the bugs, and partially so it has some utility by the time of release.

This will be an interesting thing to spin in a positive light since Apple promised it would be seeded to developers in July 2008 and in users hands by September 2008. It was subsequently pulled from iPhone OS 2.1 and considered a bit immature by developers who played with it. That was back in August 2008.

I’m thinking there might be an iPhone OS 2.2.1 between now and June to hold perhaps a few bug fixes. I think the odds of an iPhone OS 2.3 release are growing slimmer due to June/July rapidly approaching.

I’m not alone in my thoughts. John Gruber thinks the same for the most part though is slightly more optimistic on the timeline.

Categories
Apple

Apple Drops NDA

Apple today announced they are dropping the criticized NDA. This is great news, but not good enough if Apple wants to hold it’s strong position in the smart phone race. I strongly agree with Ryan Block that Apple needs to open up the app store (or just get rid of it). Jailbreaking is a pain and a risk people don’t always want to take.

It’s for Apple’s own good to open things up.

Categories
Apple Mozilla

WWDC 2008 Analysis

iPhone 3G

The Presentation

As usual I keep tabs on all the major Apple events using pretty much all the top tech sites that run “live blogs” and the like. This year none failed completely though I think they all were overcome with traffic at one point resulting in a failed load attempt. Not bad. This year I threw twitter into the mix. That was pretty interesting itself. Kevin Rose pointed out a decent audio feed. I did this in the background while I worked.

One thing I did note is that the parade of iPhone Apps got pretty painful after a while. Just wanted to yell out “we get it… cool apps built quickly… move on!”. For those who were following along at home, my predictions were mostly right (yay me!).

iPhone 3G

To me, this was really what the announcement was all about, and I’ll explain why a little later. The obvious big gain is the performance of 3G. This will win over a lot of people who just couldn’t imagine paying that much and surfing the web with EDGE. Another awesome addition is GPS support. It’s notable since geolocation is the “next big thing” [I should note update GeoLocateFox… I was ahead of my time]. I suspect there may be a few other goodies under the hood of this new iPhone that have yet to be revealed due to the suspected chipset. If Apple doesn’t unleash the full power, hackers will. Rest assured.

The real big thing here is that the phone is now much cheaper with a much more reasonable amount of storage on board. $299 for the 16GB model and $199 for the 8GB model. This is substantial for a few reasons. Besides obviously saving some cash, it makes the phone suddenly a possibility for people who would have never shelled out the original sticker price.

AT&T’s pricing looks to be $30 for unlimited data. The cheapest Voice/Data combo you could do would be $69/mo. That’s $10 more than it was for the first generation. Presumably that will help curb the cost of the massive 3G upgrades they are doing and subsidizing the iPhone’s hardware costs.

iPhone Apps

Pretty impressive demos from the screenshots I’ve seen. I’m really interested in more basic stuff should I get an iPhone. SSH, FTP, Email that doesn’t suck. I’d prefer to read/write office docs, but I guess I can always use something like Google Docs, which I’m sure will support the iPhone at some point if it doesn’t already.

Rather disgusted that I haven’t seen anything really change in terms of Application distribution or licensing. Apple is still very prohibitive of what it will allow. Don’t hold your breath on Firefox or Java anytime soon.

Apple will let you distribute Apps for free (how kind of them), but you still need to pay $99 to provide a free Application:

Standard Program $99
The Standard Program is for developers who are creating free and commercial applications for iPhone and iPod touch.

How about no charge for Applications with an OSI approved license Apple? Seems fair. No charge, and you get more software to make your ecosystem look more attractive.

Strikes me as pretty lame that a developer needs to pay $99 so Apple will let others use software for free.

  1. Disable download/install functionality.
  2. Charge $99 to distribute applications, even if they are free.
  3. Profit!

MobileMe

I was wrong regarding the use of MobileMe. Sadly it still doesn’t seem to fit the bill for something worth $99. Google provides most of the functionality pretty nicely. I suspect Google Calendar will get some iPhone sync love in the near future. In my opinion would have been better to just partner with Google and offer something really awesome and let Google monetize it. I suspect they didn’t do this because of the whole Android thing.

Jailbreak

Jailbreak is far from dead. The SDK isn’t open enough to kill off Jailbreak. Expect it to live on an coincide with Apple’s efforts for some time to come.

Mac OS X 10.6

Damn you NDA… would someone start leaking the goods 😉 . There’s some basic info out there, but nothing really juicy yet.

Photo Courtesy of Apple

Categories
Mozilla Web Development

The Winner For Most Embedded Is: SQLite

So the format war of Blue-ray vs. HD-DVD is over. There are still several other rather significant battles going on in the tech world right now that aren’t Microsoft vs. Apple or Yahoo vs. Google. For example:

Adobe Air vs. Mozilla Prism vs. Microsoft Silverlight

Google Gears vs. HTML5 Offline support

Android vs. iPhone SDK vs. Symbian

Ruby On Rails vs. PHP

Not every case will have a true “winner”. That’s not really a bad thing. Choice is good. In some cases they will merge to form one standard, such as what’s likely for offline web applications.

What is interesting is that SQLite really dominates right now. Adobe Air, Mozilla Prism, Google Gears, Android, iPhone SDK (likely through Core Data API), Symbian, Ruby On Rails (default DB in 2.0), PHP 5 (bundled but disabled in php.ini by default). It’s becoming harder and harder to ignore that SQL survived the transition from mainframe to server, and now is going from server to client.

No longer is the term “database” purely referring to an expensive RAID5 machine in a datacenter running Oracle, MySQL, DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server. It can now refer to someone’s web browser, or mobile phone.

This has really just begun to have an impact on things. The availability of good information storage, retrieval, and sorting means much less of these poorly concocted solutions and much better applications. Client side databases are the next AJAX.

Edit [2/27/2008 9:14 AM EST]: Added Symbian, since they also use SQLite. Thanks Chris.

Categories
Apple

MacWorld SF 2008

Another year, another great day of news coverage. I’m obsessed with watching it evolve and monitor several sites throughout the keynote. As expected this was a pretty big one. I suspect this year will contain the most product announcements of any year for Apple. They have a lot of products due for a refresh and announcements expected. Even Steve himself said:

All of this in the first two weeks, and we’ve got fifty more weeks to go.

In all the keynotes I’ve followed, this was the most aggressive agenda. 2008 is going to rock for Apple products.