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

I’ll be teaching our iPhone Development For Web Programmers class in Raleigh/Durham on March 24-25.

The class is specifically designed to teach professional web programmers — developers who spend their days writing Java, .NET, Ruby, Python or PHP — how to build native apps for the iPhone. No prior Objective-C or Cocoa/Cocoa Touch experience required.

$899 With Early Registration And Reader Discount

The class is $1300. Early bird pricing, valid through 3/1, is $1099. Take another $200 of the price by registering with a “mo” discount code.

Details And Registration

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How should an iPad app differ from an iPhone app? VentureBeat piece on flirting/dating app maker Skout is adapting their app

All about EPUB, the ebook standard for Apple’s iBookstore

Objective-C client library for TweetPhoto API While other Twitter image posting providers provide REST APIs, TweetPhoto has made a native Obj-C client library available.

The iPad CPU: All You Need to Know About the Apple A4 The fruits of Apple’s $278MM acquisition of P.A. Semiconductor.

Amazon API Use Prohibited From Apps Popular app RedLaser tells the story of Amazon’s refusal to let them use their APIs from an app.

Apple Makes $209 on Each $499 iPad

Bookmarklet As App Store Paid App

Store Kit Simulator New project simulates Store Kit.

Old World vs. New World Perspective piece on the iPad.

Automating developer-to-developer distribution These build scripts make sharing apps amongst developers a snap.

What Drives iTunes App Store Search Rankings

Promoting Your iPhone in Print Better title: drive sales by handing out card-stock mock ups of your app.

App Store Expense MonitorFree OS-X software that tallies your total App Store spending.

Want coverage? Send us your tips/links and/or post it yourself at iPhoneFlow

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Bump, the Y Combinator funded company that got a lot of attention last year as the Billionth App, has released an API that lets devs use Bump’s bump-to-exchange scheme for swapping data phone-to-phone in their own apps.

The API is free to use unless you are generating revenue as a direct result of a bump, have more than 10,000,000 bumps/month or more than 2,500 simultaneous users.

Integrating the API looks straightforward and uses the protocol/delegate pattern familiar to iPhone devs. Have a look at this tutorial for details.

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When we started putting together this week’s This Week column the iPad news overshadowed everything else. So we’ve decided to dedicate this week’s column to noteworthy iPad items.

As promised, Apple released an updated SDK, along with an iPad simulator, HIG, sample applications, programming guide and documentation on producing universal applications.

iPad Big Picture John Gruber on Apple’s meta-messagaing in the announcement event and the importance of the A4 chip.

Future Shock Fraser Speirs provides some perspective on the anti-iPad faction of technological sophisticates.

Good conversation in the comments on our own iPad: What Developers Need To Know

Walt Mossberg’s First Impressions of the New Apple iPad

The iPad Is Like Holding The Future. But Only Because I Graduated From iPhone School.

Is Apple Evil Aaron Swartz on Apple embracing and extending its gatekeeper role.

Both Nick Dalton, in his iPad - First Impressions piece, and Noel Llopis, in his Figuring Out The iPad piece, observe that the session length for an iPad will be very different — longer — from an iPhone. Lots of other gems in these pieces, particularly for devs.

Multi-Resolution Device A blurb by Jeff LaMarche enable apps to run at fullscreen

The iPad Is The Gadget We Never Knew We Needed

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Apple just finished their iPad event. Here’s what you’ll want to know as a developer:

Jobs says the device is for, “Browsing the web. Doing email. Enjoying and sharing pics. Watching videos. Enjoying music. Playing games. Reading ebooks.”

It’ll run unmodified iPhone apps out of the box in two modes: actual size, which takes up half the screen, and scaled up 2x for full screen. This implies the 9.7″ screen has a resolution of 960-by-640. Update: henning informs us that it’s 1024×768.

The device runs Apple’s own A4 chip at 1GHz. Other than a bare Wikipedia page there’s not much data on the chip. It’s an ARM chip, which is why it can run the unmodified iPhone binaries.

The device has 802.11N WiFi and Blue Tooth 2.1 + EDD. Unlocked 3G GSM is an option. There is no camera. Not clear on compass/location hardware — maps app suggests location capabilities, but can’t find anything. Update: Ken Pespisa points out that Apple’s published the specs since I wrote this: compass and location in the 3G model.

Apple will release the SDK later today. It’s not clear whether this’ll be pre-release and, therefore, covered under NDA or not. If it’s not, we’ll have how-to pieces starting shortly. Update: it’s available, and it’s pre-release. We’ll queue up our pieces for after the NDA drops.

What’s notable about the SDK? From the press event we can say:

There’s still no multi-tasking.

With the larger screen comes many new UI elements and layout options. These options aren’t lifted directly from OS-X, but are a blend of OS-X and iPhone OS: Apps can have panels/panes. Tables can have multiple columns. Tab interfaces have been expanded to include OS-X like top-of-screen tab-window/panel picker style (vs. bottom of window iPhone tab menus). Most notable:

Pop-over/drop-dow style menus are in frequent use; e.g., the bookmark and font-chooser floating menus.

The iPhone HIG and other Apple documentation make it clear that iPhone is considered a one column, one window platform. Does that imply the pop-over style menus won’t come to the iPhone?

Lots of implications here for building your app specifically for one device or the other; if the new goodies on the iPad become expected/familiar then bare iPhone apps will rub iPad users the wrong way; conversely, spending the time to make a true iPad app has to be weighed against the 70MM devices with iPhone display specs.

As an incentive for developers Apple will be pimping iPad optimized apps in the store.

Finally, Apple is selling the iWork apps in the App store at $9.99 each. Good move, setting a higher price expectation.

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Vais Salikhov wrote to tell me about Find In Page, his newly available $0.99 app. The app isn’t. Instead, it’s a Mobile Safari bookmarklet. Confused? Allow me to explain:

Mobile Safari, like any modern browser, supports bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are compact blurbs of JavaScript saved as a bookmark. When you navigate to a JavaScript bookmark the browser simply executes the JavaScript in the current page.

So, instead of writing a complete Safari replacement to add the missing Find In Page capability, you write JavaScript to take the search term and then find it in the page. Add that JavaScript as a bookmark and you’re all set.

Vais’ twist is this: he’s selling his bookmarklet in the App Store for $0.99. His angle is clever: he’s created a simple app that places the bookmarklet JavaScript on the pasteboard. The user can then add a bookmark and set its location by pasting the JavaScript. This YouTube video demonstrates the installation:

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The Best App Ever podcast episode. Features interviews with: Jeff Scott, creator of the Best App Ever Awards and founder of 148Apps; and people-behind-the-nominees segments with Garret Murray, creator of the aptly named Ego app; and Yuanzhen Li and Michael Parker creators of the TrueHDR photography app.

For easy scanning of the interview, here’s what was covered and when:

Part 1 - Jeff Scott, Founder/148 Apps

1:00 Contest origin story
1:30 “Honor the best, not the best selling”
2:00 Approximately 3,000 apps nominated
2:15 27,000 votes to nominate
2:30 110,000 votes for nominees
3:00 “Thousands” of click/day from the contest to the App Store
3:30 Jeff’s favorite apps: Tweetie 2, Instapaper Pro
4:30 300-400 new games/day
5:00 Apps for kids, the GiggleApps site

Part 2 - Garrett Murray, The “Ego” App

8:00 Ego, the App
10:30 XML parsing
12:30 Looks like UITableView, is actually all custom views
16:00 Developing like you’re making a web app
18:00 “Extremely niche application”
19:00 TUAW, Daring Fireball exposure
22:00 “Built in press engine” — whenever he adds another service to the app it’s covered by that service
23:00 Total users: 10,000

Part 3 - Yuanzhen Li and Michael parker, TrueHDR

23:00 High Dynamic Range photography from the iPhone
24:30 No developer-accesible way to set exposure; their clever solution: 3GS auto-focus really sets exposure to a region
25:45 Aligning two images
30:00 Made it into the Top-100 paid apps

You can listen using the Flash player below, download the MP3, or subscribe to the iPhone Developer Podcast using the instructions at the bottom of this post.

Keep up to date with our iPhone developers’ podcast

Subscribe to our iPhone Development Podcast:

1. Use the podcast’s feed with the feed app of your choice: http://podcast.mobileorchard.com/feed/podcast/
2. Subscribe using iTunes by clicking here.

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Those Flurry folks are clever. Sifting through their app usage data, they identified usage from approximately 50 devices originating from — and never leave — Apple’s campus that appear to be the tablet.

The data suggests the device will run iPhone OS, specifically an as-yet unreleased iPhone 3.2 OS. The company tracked application usage over more than 200 apps, and noted an emphasis on news, books and other daily media consumption apps.

Read their analysis for details.

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AdMob Mobile Metrics Q4/09: iPhone doubled its share of smartphone global requests to 27%.

Yelp Challenges Foursquare, Adds Checkins to iPhone App The location-based application realm is sure getting a lot of attention lately. Yelp has recently updated their application to allow you to check-in at your current location, similar to Foursquare.

App Removed At Request of Competition Apparently not the first time this has happened. Includes a petition asking for a change in the policy.

Making A Living (Barely) On The iPhone App Store (aka The Numbers Post) Noel Llopis from Snappy Touch discusses the financial performance of his latest iPhone application “Flower Garden” without hiding any of the gory details.

Apple Responsible for 99.4% of Mobile App Sales in 2009 (Updated) A great summary of the latest report from Garter concerning overall mobile app sales and revenue in 2009 and how Apple has affected things.

Bing To Become Default iPhone Search? There seem to be ongoing talks between Apple and Microsoft concerning the possibility of switching from using Google to Bing as the default search engine on the iPhone.

iPhone 4G Rumors Visualized

Pocket God Becomes First iPhone App To Sell Over 2M Units The frequently updated iPhone game “Pocket God” has demonstrated its popularity in becoming the first iPhone application to sell more than 2 million units. It’s definitely worth giving it a try if you haven’t already.

Apple Tablet Design Reportedly Akin to Flattened First-Generation iPhone With the big announcement coming from Apple next Wednesday, the rumor mill is in high gear about what the possible tablet will be like. A lot of signs point to this design which seems to be a larger version of the first-generation iPhone.

Man Buried in Haiti Rubble Uses iPhone to Treat Wounds, Survive Just another testament to how useful the iPhone can be in almost any situation!

iSketch Drawing program developer by an 11 year old kid. iTunes rating: 4.5 stars!

Want coverage? Send us your tips/links and/or post it yourself at iPhoneFlow

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