iPedia

Location, location, location

You likely don’t need me to tell you that location-based services have exploded since the release of the iPhone 3GS and iPhone OS 3. Now that there are a million services (and apps to go with them) that might poll your location, Apple has responded by adding in a control panel where you can divvy up location permissions on an app-by-app basis on a single screen:

This can be found by going to Settings > General > Location Services, where you can either turn it all off or turn services off individually. On top of that, the screen also shows you which apps have polled your location in the last 24 hours, so you always know what’s been keeping tabs on you. Though all apps need your permission to grab your location, all of this info in one screen is really nice to have—it allows you to get a quick look at your settings, and it keeps you aware of which apps have been pulling that sensitive information. (In addition to this, Apple has added a little pointer to the top menubar to notify you when you’re using an app that is currently pulling your location info.)

Expanded enterprise support

I wasn’t able to test any of these features (as I don’t have accounts that I would test them with), but it’s certainly worth noting that iOS 4 comes with a greatly expanded list of enterprise features aimed at business users:

• You can now encrypt your e-mail or attachments with your iPhone PIN code. The API for this is also available to developers so that you will be able to encrypt data inside of third-party apps as well.
• Apple now offers a mobile device management solution so that someone deploying lots of iPhones within a company can manage them.
• Wireless app distribution: no longer do you have to deploy apps across your company’s iPhones with a physical connection. You can distribute apps to anywhere in the world from your own servers.
• As we mentioned in the Mail section, you can now have multiple Exchange accounts on a single phone.
• There’s now support for Exchange Server 2010.
• There’s now also support for SSL VPN.

Developers, developers, developers!

by Clint Ecker

Apple’s big steps on the user-facing side of iOS are matched by, if not eclipsed by, the magnitude of new and newly opened APIs for developers.

Support for multi-tasking is one of the biggest additions, and Apple makes it very easy to add differing levels of backgrounding to applications. What most people will notice is what Apple is calling Fast App Switching. Essentially, the entire app is frozen in place nearly perfectly. Music will resume playing at the exact point it was playing when you switched away; it is literally as if someone hit the pause button on the application. All applications will gain support for this feature simply by linking and compiling their application against the iOS 4 SDK. Applications can proceed from there to take advantage of new events sent to applications which are about to be backgrounded or made inactive. Similarly, developers can perform special functions when their apps are brought back to life.

Going beyond Fast App Switching, Apple has blessed three classes of applications with preferential treatment when it comes to multi-tasking. These are VoIP, audio, and location-based applications.

iOS 4 treats each of these classes of applications slightly differently. VoIP applications will be background-launched on system boot so they are always available, audio applications will stay backgrounded as long as they play music, and Apple has provided several new methodologies for getting at location data while location-based applications are in different states.

It seems that Apple will be trying out these three types of “true” backgrounding to see how they work in practice against a wide swath of applications. The company’s attention is focused on background processes that simply cannot be mimicked by using push alerts and so forth. Twitter, social networking, IM, and gaming clients can simulate very nearly any kind of real-time update by just using push notifications. Alarm-style applications now have scheduled local notifications. These are classes of applications that Apple very likely believes it has “solved” the backgrounding issue for.

Many users might insist that they need Application X to be constantly checking for new articles in the background, but do they really? When you resume the app, it’s going to check in and grab anything new. Some people will complain that they might be resuming the app in a subway tunnel, but is it really necessary for Apple to focus its efforts on such a niché?

Maybe it is, and Apple will be undoubtedly looking for the next class of application it might support in these ways. However, that next tier is possibly an extremely broad group of applications—those which would like to perform arbitrary network access while backgrounded. Furthermore, it seems likely that the people demanding these features are mostly power-users, a group that Apple is comfortable with not placating when the company’s energy is best diverted elsewhere.

People have begun to notice how Apple leverages its “incredible patience,” manifest in the time it took to survey the landscape and roll out an extremely limited form of multi-tasking. We believe Apple will continue this practice of patience to see if even more extended forms of backgrounding are necessary.

Game Center and GameKit

by Clint Ecker

Something had to be done about the lack of a centralized social gaming center on iOS. There have been whole companies whose sole purpose has been to build such systems—ngmoco’s Plus+, Chillingo’s Crystal, OpenFeint X, and more—but it seems like every app uses a different, incompatible system. Apple clearly believes this is something it needs to provide in a centralized way that any developer can integrate. Developers will interface with new GameKit classes that will allow for defining in-application achievements, access to custom leaderboards, matching groups of users together based on any number of criteria, and even in-application voice chat. That’s right, the technology now exists to have your sexuality called into question by a 13 year old kid while playing a head-to-head game of Angry Birds… over the Internet.

Game Center, the application, will be backed by Apple’s servers and will maintain the connections between Game Center accounts with Apple IDs. People will have Game Center handles and maintain Game Center friends lists. You can find a friend and see what game they’re currently playing, challenge them to one of your favorite games, and more.

Overall, there’s simply too much developery goodness to go into, and much of what I could write would result in a stern email from Apple PR, but a short list of exciting things we can all look forward to are:

• iAd integration
• Quicklook previews
• Calendar and Photo Gallery integration
• In-application SMS composition and delivery
• In-application support for Captive Wireless Networks—those which need authentication before you can begin using them, like at airports or coffee shops.
• MapKit improvements: draggable annotations and custom shape and path overlays. Accelerate libraries for doing linear algebra, DSP, matrice, and vector operations. More or less a port of vecLib from the desktop.
• CoreLocation update will allow for coarser grained monitoring of position, e.g. when you enter regions or make significant location changes.
• CoreMotion is now how developers will deal with the accelerometer and get 3D space data from the new Gyroscope in the iPhone 4.
• CoreTelephony will allow applications to respond to phone call events (knowing when you are dialing or began a call)
• NSRegularExpression provides developers with a built-in and supported class to extract data from strings.

Finally, in a move that will provide many applications with a nice performance boost, the LLVM compiler is now included as an optional compiler for use in iPhone development.

Conclusion

Despite its flaws, the iOS 4 update is certainly a solid one with enough new features to make it worth upgrading for pretty much everyone. Trying to live without even the most basic aspects of multitasking (notably state-saving) can be frustrating once you have used it for a while—during the time I wrote this, I continually switched back and forth between an iOS 4 phone and an iPhone OS 3.x phone, so I know from experience.

The most exciting part about iOS 4 is really what third-party developers will do with the 1,500 new APIs. After all, the iPhone experience has become one that is almost defined by its apps, and Apple has opened up a new world of possibilities with its latest API offerings. As we go into the second half of 2010, we’re sure to see plenty of new apps that do creative things with Game Center, multitasking capabilities, the camera, and more.

So, unless you have a specific reason to hold back—jailbreakers, we’re looking at you—or you’re a poor, abandoned original iPhone owner, we can’t see why you wouldn’t want to upgrade your iPhone or iPod touch. We may not have covered every single detail of the new OS in this writeup, but our experience says it’s well worth the upgrade.

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