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Mobile Orchard

The iPhone App Developers' Blog: iPhone Programming, Developer News, Interviews And Tutorials

This Week in iPhone News - July 3/2009Yesterday

Trixel Postmortem Very informative postmortem of the iPhone game “Trixel”.

Birdfeed An alternative Twitter client for the iPhone. Includes features such as: local caching, refresh timestamps, and SMS-style direct messages.

Here’s How iPhone App Store Ratings Work More criticisms of the iPhone App Store.

Essential iPhone Memory Testing Great tips for debugging memory issues.

John Carmack and Tom Mustaine on Doom, iPhone Desires, and the Future of id Mobile Engaging interview with the technical and business end of id software.

Develop Native iPhone Apps Easily Corona is getting a lot of buzz. The basics are covered in this informative article. Our next podcast — due Sunday — is an interview with Corona’s creators.

New In iPhone 3.0 Tutorial Series, Part 3: Copy & Paste With UIPasteboardJuly 2

Welcome to part-3 of our New In iPhone 3.0 Tutorial/Programming Series. The previous two articles in this series covered in-app email and shake to undo/redo.

This time, we’ll cover the basics of reading-from and writing-to the pasteboard.

Pasteboard Overview

Multiple Pasteboards

There isn’t just one pasteboard on the iPhone:

There are two system pasteboards: a General system-wide pasteboard that’s used for copy-paste operations and a Find pasteboard that holds the last search string.

Additionally, applications can create their own pasteboards that can be used by other apps. For example, a point-of-sales app and a credit card terminal app could use a shared pasteboard to pass payment details back and forth.

Multiple Representations

An item added to the pasteboard has a type. More precisely, when an item is added to the pasteboard it has representations in one or more types. A web address, for example, could be stored as both a string

Lite To Paid iPhone Application Data Migrations With Custom URL HandlersJune 29

Stephen Lombardo and Zetetic are the creators of the encrypted iPhone data vault Strip.

Apple enforces a number of restrictions on applications in the App Store. Among the most painful is the lack of feature-limited trials. Applications are either completely free, or the customer must pay up front, sight unseen. The proliferation of “Lite” applications is a direct result of this shortcoming. Publishers will often create two application versions: the first is fully functional but costs money, the second is “Lite” and comes with limited features but zero price tag. The goal is for prospective customers to try the free version first and then decide to buy the paid full version separately if they like it.

Because free applications have greater exposure this approach is widely advocated as a means to increase visibility and grow sales. When building a game or other stateless application the approach makes complete sense. However, utility applications often maintain information entered by the device owner. Application authors are faced with a dilemma because the iPhone’s security sandbox prevents one application from reading another application’s files. Thus, when cust

This Week in iPhone News - June 26/2009June 26

Demographics and Behavioral Characteristics of iPhone and iPod Users Interesting data from AdMob and comScore.

New iPhone Users with Activation Headaches Get iTunes Credit Apple apologizes for the 3G S activation woes.

Pinch Media Watcher Pinch Media releases a native iPhone SDK application for viewing your application’s stats.

The Fable of Free More testimonies from the iPhone developer trenches regarding free apps.

iPhone 3.0 Features Which iPhone 3.0 software features does your iPhone support? Take a look at this handy guide from Apple.

Announcing: The Unofficial iPhone SDK Feedback ProjectJune 26

A couple of days ago, I received a note from James DonFrancesco about an unexpected behavior change introduced in iPhone 3.0:

In 2.X, apps could launch a tel:// url to dial the phone without user input. In 3.0, Apple introduced a verification box to obtain user permission when an tries to make an outbound call.

This change breaks James’ baby monitor app — which makes calls parents when their kids wake — and diminishes the user experience of the whole genre of specialty dialer apps.

James, reasonably, wanted to gather a posse of similarly effected people to to collectively lobby Apple for a change; perhaps convince them to borrow from the Core Location user experience and let users grant apps permission to dial without validation.

James’ situation is a specific example of a larger pattern to address: there isn’t an acceptable way for iPhone developers to constructively provide feedback with gravity.

Sure, Apple takes bug reports. However, the system is effectively opaque. Is the submitter alone with his/her issue, or does it effect a silent majority of developers? Furthermore, while bugs are objectively resolvable, they’re a subset of the much larger category of subjective feedback, e.g., policy/behavior changes.

There is