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Posts tagged with "developers"

iOS 4.3 Gestures, Bezels and An Apple Patent From Last Year

In the first beta of iOS 4.3, Apple introduced “multitasking gestures” for iPad: offered as a preview for developers to play with and test compatibility with apps, these 4 and 5-finger multitouch gestures allow users to execute a series of actions otherwise assigned to the Home button. You can switch back and forth between apps, open and close the multitasking tray or pinch back to the homescreens. The gestures need to be activated through Xcode as, again, they are a developer preview of a feature that won’t even be enabled in the public release of iOS 4.3, as Apple let devs know last night.

The presence of gestures that offer some functionalities previously exclusive to the Home button also let the rumor mill run wild, with some bloggers speculating that Apple may get rid of the Home button in the next iterations of the iPad and iPhone. Personally, I think gestures on the iPhone’s tiny screen are a terrible idea – and it gets worse if you have non-average, big hands.

Gestures are a neat new feature for the iPad that provide a glimpse at something Apple is clearly working on: more multi-touch capabilities for iOS devices. These very same gestures, though, gave several developers a hard time trying to figure out how to integrate them with their apps. Read more

Nuance Allowing Developers to Easily Add Speech Recognition to their Apps

If you’re an App developer you might be interested in Nuance’s (known for their speech recognition software) latest pursuit. Nuance is now enabling other developers to incorporate and take advantage of their speech recognition software and place it into third party apps, expanding any app’s functionality in a very cool way.

Nuance has previously teamed up with Ask.com to deliver their speech recognition technology to the Ask for iPhone app and have now opened up the Nuance Mobile Developer Program for all developers. By joining, Nuance says developers will gain access Dragon Mobile SDK with support for more than eight languages plus assorted support forums and documentation.

If you’re interested in using Dragon’s Mobile SDK to add speech recognition, head over here. Full announcement is posted after the break.

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The Problems with a High Resolution Display on the iPad 2

Over the past few weeks there has been quite a back and forth discussion on the possible inclusion of a Retina or high resolution display on the iPad 2. Facts seemed to solidify when Engadget ran an article suggesting the second-generation iPad would have a high resolution display, though they did not specify the exact resolution. But then John Gruber yesterday seemed to disagree with that suggestion citing cost issues, uncovered UI graphics of an iPad camera app that are not optimized for a high resolution display and his own sources.

So why has there been so much doubt and to and fro-ing over whether the iPad 2’s display is high resolution? Well put simply, because there are so many barriers that would have to be overcome and issues that Apple would have to resolve.  Click through to read the full article.

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With iOS 4.3, Apple Drops iPhone 3G Support (and iPod Touch 2nd gen)

Apple just seeded a new build of iOS, version 4.3, to developers, and it looks like they finally dropped support for the 2008 iPhone 3G. The device is indeed not listed on the iOS developer website, and nothing makes us think that future beta versions will be released for that model. The latest OS for the iPhone 3G may be iOS 4.2.

AT&T discontinued the iPhone 3G last June. Several users who installed iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G last year lamented that the OS was slow and unusable, mainly because of the slow processor and less RAM on the 2008 device. Apple tried to make things better with iOS 4.1 and 4.2, but the iPhone 3G was clearly showing signs of its age.

Update: there’s iOS 4.3 for iPod touch 2nd generation either.

Apple Releases iOS 4.3 Beta, Here’s What’s New

A few minutes ago Apple released iOS 4.3 beta to developers. It’s available now in the iOS Dev Center. The beta is available for iOS devices and the second generation Apple TV. Supported iOS mobile devices are iPad, iPhone 4 and 3GS, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen. Build number is 8F5148b. A pre-release version of the Apple TV software has been provided to test AirPlay functionalities with 4.3 apps.

It looks like iOS 4.3 has some cool new gestures built specifically for the iPad. 4 & 5 finger gestures; pinch to the home screen, swipe up to reveal multitasking tray, swipe left/right to switch apps. Update: even though Apple says the gestures are there, I can’t seem to be able to use them at all. They don’t work for me in Apple’s own apps, and there’s no option to activate them in the Settings. We’re hearing several reports of other users unable to use these gestures. Read more

Apple Seeds Xcode 4 Preview 6 to Developers

A few minutes ago Apple seeded a new Xcode 4 preview build to developers, which is available in the Mac  and iOS Dev Centers. The new version , labelled Developer Preview 6, adds a number of features and enhancements over the previous preview build, which was released in November. Xcode 4 is a major new version of Apple’s development suite which sports lots of new features and a new single-windowed UI. The first version of Xcode 4 preview was released during the WWDC in June, the second build was seeded in late July, Preview 3 was made available on September 2, Preview 4 was released in October.

Check out the release notes below. Read more

Enable Hidden Mac App Store Debug Menu

We’re not sure why the average Mac App Store user would want to do this, but we couldn’t resist to post about the Debug menu Apple left behind in the Mac App Store. Discovered by Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater earlier today, enabling the menu is fairly easy: you just need to quit the Mac App Store, open Terminal and write:

defaults write com.apple.appstore ShowDebugMenu -bool true

Then relaunch the Mac App Store. To revert back to a Mac App Store without Debug menu, simply replace “true” in the string above with “false”. The menu, anyway, is quite interesting as it allows you to play around with a bunch of hidden settings such as shadows and width in the App Store’s webview, the animations and duration of “flying icons” (when you download an app and it goes straight to the Dock). You can also enable and disable the Purchase Check, although we wouldn’t really recommend to tweak these default settings – you don’t want to break the Mac App Store app.

We think this Debug menu will be removed in a future update, as Apple doesn’t want users to modify, or even see, this stuff. Still, you can check it out for now.