It’s no secret that “multitasking” is one of the great new features of iOS 4. Unfortunately, many people have a misconception about what Apple has implemented. Hopefully this short essay will help you understand the restrictions and the good reasons for having these limits.
On your desktop, multitasking means that any application or process can run [...]
If you’re like me, the iPad has changed how you look at computers in just a matter of weeks. The possibilities for this device seem endless. It’s natural at this point to start thinking about the future, and to do that thinking in terms of the past.
As an example, we’ve been getting plenty of feature requests [...]
Here we are on the brink of a new iPhone OS product introduction and developers are facing yet another crunch with device IDs for Ad Hoc testing.
Apple currently lets each iPhone developer, whether a company or an individual account, assign 100 devices for testing purposes. A large chunk of those available devices get used by [...]
As a result of my last essay, it has come to my attention that there is a simple and effective way to get Apple’s attention for critical bug fixes. An email to appreview@apple.com that explains the critical problem and which product is affected will help speed your update through the system.
Use this email address only [...]
As we approach the first anniversary of selling things on the iTunes App Store, I’d like to take the opportunity to look at where we’ve been and where we’d like to go. A lot of good things have happened since last July 11th, but there’s still much room for improvement.
Note: These words may be mine, [...]
What happened?
In spite of plenty of advance warning from Twitter, we got caught by the Twitpocalypse bug.
For the 2.0.1 release, we had tested our software extensively. I actually wrote an emulation layer on top of the code that reads data from Twitter that added a large number to every ID read from Twitter. This testing [...]
Another area where I find iPhone development to be a bit convoluted was with toolbars and action sheets. The sheets are conceptually tied to the toolbar, yet there is no glue to combine UIActionSheet with UIToolbar. It’s also fairly difficult to represent your application state in the toolbar—an example is the refresh button in Twitterrific [...]
Every once in awhile you read a blog post that completely changes the way you think about a problem. Matt Gallagher’s Cocoa With Love is one of those blogs where it happens often. If you’re not subscribing to his RSS feed, do it now.
In particular, this post addressed a problem that every iPhone developer has [...]
Assume the following:
You have an application that you’re selling on the App Store. This application, MyApp 1.0, works on both iPhones and iPod touches with the 2.2.1 firmware.
The compelling new APIs in iPhone SDK 3.0 allow you to implement a bunch of great new features in your product. Let’s say you add a Map View [...]
Many of us are developing iPhone applications running in a simulator connected to a very fast Internet connection. Too bad the customers of these applications won’t be using the same environment.
It’s very important to be able to profile and debug your application while it’s running on a slow network. You’ll find lots of weird timing [...]