Apple iPhone OS 3.0 Announcement summary

Here are highlights of what was announced for the iPhone OS 3.0 release early this afternoon from Apple:

• Cut and paste: it was worth the wait, the touch interaction to do this looks very cool (see picture at right). Works across applications and does undo.
• Multimedia messaging: you can attach a picture to a text message
• Ability to choose a group of photos and send them in a single email
• Push email notification
• Landscape mode text entry (so what)
• Turn-by-turn GPS navigation.
• Available in the summer. That's as detailed as it gets. No doubt will be linked to the new iPhone model coming out in July.
• Virtually all of the new features will work with the original, pre-3G iPhone (exceptions: multimedia messaging and stereo bluetooth)
• Peer-to-peer linkups between individual iPhones for games, file sharing, etc. This exists now with things like AirSharing and Holdem, but those companies probably rolled their own; now it's part of the API
• API support for applications that connect to external devices. Demonstrations with medical devices were given (see pic at right). Medical applications of new technology are always a big win in corporate presentations; the real news here is that this will open up remoting of all sorts of sophisticated devices for music, video, information systems, anything you can imagine.
• Ability to search in your emails on the server side, and search in your calendar items
• Search your iPhone contents with Spotlight (well-known to Mac users)
  
• The Sims 3 will run on the iPhone (see pic at right)

iPhone SDK Presentation at CJUG 2/17/09

Our local Java User's Group chapter, CJUG recently hosted a presentation by Rakesh Vidyadharan titled iPhone SDK: Java Developers Perspective (link to PDF). It wasn't so much an immersion in iPhone development per se, but an introduction to development in Objective C.

Some of the things I found interesting:

• The SDK requires an Intel-based Mac
• The MVC approach is pretty much baked into the framework. Not everyone likes that.
• Development with an emulator is a breeze, but pushing an app to a real iPhone is time consuming
• Getting apps considered for inclusion in the app store is well-documented, but a convoluted process

Some things about Objective C:

• Very similar to TCL scripting
• Weak typing and dynamically-bound variables like javascript, ruby and php
• There's no namespaces or packages, which means every class has to have a complete unique name. To group variables, developers adopt precursors, like CUreader, CUwriter, CUcreator, etc. And the language has several precursors reserved for the language core. For example, you can't define any classes or variables beginning with NS, IB, or UI.
  
• Parameter names are part of the signature of a method. For example, foo(first_name: "Greg", last_name: "Sandell")
• The code is visibly very different from Java, or even C and C++. Many lines start with a plus or minus sign.
  

Object-Oriented characteristics of Objective C:

• Much less a "real" Objected Oriented language than C++
• Objects don't automatically inherit a base Object as in java. You have to explicitly extend NSObject
• Objects automatically have setters and getters, like ruby
• Like C, you completely manage your own memory. OsX since Tiger has a garbage collector, but Objective C doesn't use it
• Memory is managed by a incremental counting approach called refcount. Each alloc increments refcount, each release decrements it
• Dealloc is like finalize in java
  
• Messaging is a big part of the language. For example, methods are invoked via messages.