I reported late in 2011 on what the process is to move from an individual to a company developer account. One effect of this change is that you are getting a new developer account identifier which is a long number beginning with an 8. The main advantage of this move is that you can have multiple team members.

Having been on a company account for a couple of months you might notice that you get daily, weekly and financial reports for both the old and the new account. On iTunes Connect you have a selection to choose the old and the new account. While you cease to receive entires on the daily and weekly reports after a very short transition period you will see financial reports to go on in parallel quite some time longer.

I have been wondering why this is and through probing inquiry with Apple’s Finance Team I managed to uncover the reason for this.

I switched in October 2011 and you can see a drastic drop in the financial report numbers after the switch. But I still have  a couple of dollars of earnings as late as the March sales report for USA. The explanation in one word: Sarbanes-Oxley, in one sentence: It’s the law!

No Back-Dating Allowed

When a customer purchases an app they make that purchase with a credit card, since they are unable to submit payment with cash through iTunes. Once they click to buy your app, that sale will appear in the daily trend reports. The credit card company has to release these funds to Apple, which may be on the same day, within a week, or even longer.

Therefore, there are times that a customer clicks to purchase an app in one fiscal month, but the funds are released to Apple in a different fiscal month. When the credit card company releases the funds to Apple, they get reported in the financial reports. They are only allowed to report transactions that have completed their financial systems, and that may not necessarily be the month in which the transaction was initiated.

Apple has to report those funds when they are received and cannot back date them as that would be illegal accounting acceding to Sarbanes-Oxley rules. This is why you may see differences in the trends reports as opposed to the financial reports. Apple has no control over how long it takes the credit card companies to release the sales earnings to them.

Conclusion

In summary it is not Apple’s fault but entirely the credit card companies’ which apparently can take several months (!) to release funds for individual purchases.

I was told that this transitional period can last several months and while it is a pain to deal with those minute extra reports I can only hope that some day the credit card companies have found and reported all these individual purchases to Apple.

Oh well, maybe … some day …

I was already packing my suitcase for my vacation next week when I learned about the makings of the biggest scandal that is about to happen on the Apple campus. And I am not talking about AntennaGate or WarmGate, this is a REAL scandal! I just had to sit down and document the facts – as we know them so far.

A source close to the matter informed me (on condition of anonymity) that Apple CEO Tim Cook has set a plan in motion that will – so he fears – dramatically tarnish Apple’s reputation and throw them back to the technological stone age … at least when it comes to social media.

It is a little know fact that shortly after returning to save Apple in the late 1980s Apple founder Steve Jobs established a strict ban on smoking cigarettes on the Apple campus. This was not even known to his biographer and thus omitted from the book. Contrary to what was written in the biography it were not health concerns or even a public mandate, but Jobs had gotten hold of an internal chart that showed a correlation of number of source code lines dropping and the level of smoke addiction of individual employees. Smokers’ productivity was roughly 5% lower than their peers, and Jobs reasoned that the frequent smoking breaks must have been the reason for that.

Steve Jobs was well aware that this was a very unpopular move and so he mandated that this be kept a secret. This ban took place in 1998 one year after US President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 13058 which banned “smoking in all interior spaces owned, rented, or leased by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, as well as in any outdoor areas under executive branch control near air intake ducts. The rest is history, Apple was saved partially because of the invigorated productivity and rose again to become the most valuable brand in history.

Apple’s current CEO Tim Cook had not been aware of this unpopular decision because he joined Apple much later, in 1998. They say “those who do not know past mistakes are bound to repeat them.”. This post is a chronicle of one CEO probably proving this adage right.

Cook had already been acting as interim CEO when we learned in Spring 2011 that there had been a drastic decrease in programmer productivity as of late. This had resulted in iCloud being buggy and would not make the deadline of getting released at WWDC 2011 together with iOS 5 and the new iPhone. iCloud is Apple’s big bet and not being able to ship the iPhone 4S with iCloud in Summer  2011 caused the CEO to go on a rampage. No real solution was found and so Cook decided to preview iCloud to developers in June and do the actual launch of iPhone and iCloud in Fall.

About the same time as this happened Apple – quite uncharacteristically – had begun talks to enter a partnership with Twitter to integrate their popular social network with Apple products. We know that the partnership was fruitful, Twitter gained even more popularity because of the tight integration with iOS and Apple finally was able to shed the ridicule they incurred from launching Ping. One side-deal of this partnership was that Apple would get access to the Twitter “firehose”, the unfiltered unrestricted live-stream of all tweets.

This stream of tweets would be used to train the artificial intelligence product Siri which Apple had acquired in April 2010. But that was not the only use the CEO Cook had in mind for the combination of Siri and Twitter.

Being “old school” and an avid runner Cook is considering social networking as much as a waste of time (and health) as smoking. He developed the theory that all these frequent interruption and “quick tweets” would be detrimental to programmer’s productivity. But before the partnership with Twitter and the acquisition of Siri he had lacked a way to prove this theory.

Apple employees are living in constant fear of overstepping the line when it comes to social networking. My source told me that one of the first things that new hires are being told is that they should refrain from tweeting about work and keep their employment a secret from the public. This is why you often see profile descriptions like “I work for a fruit company” and “I speak for myself and not my employer” in Twitter profiles of Apple employees. Other ways of masquerading include discussing BMW cars, music and the liberal arts.

Ironically these terms are forming a recognizable pattern that an AI like Siri can look for and this identify the Apple employees who are spending way too much time in “tweeting around” during working hours.  This finally gave Cook the information he needed to produce a list of 1000 most-distracted individuals who will find themselves on the ejection seat as of coming Monday.

On a recent conference call with investors call Cook had mentioned that “we’re doing some things are differently now” and we now know what he meant. Cook is known to be ruling with an iron fist over the “regular foot soldiers”. So in stark contrast to Steve Jobs, who was content with a ban, he is going to be laying off the individuals on his hot list.

Why now? Well Apple’s stock price is on an all time high and the next big event will be WWDC 2012 in June. So the strategy is to do the layoffs in April because the “shareholder value” can digest this the easiest right at this time.

Apple has been hiring new employees like crazy in the past few weeks, partly because the company is growing in leaps and bounds, partly because Cook has instructed his VPs to buffer the coming bloodletting. Also managers were instructed to not hire people who are overzealous on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Instead an internal memo is instructing them to respond with “sorry, but you weren’t a good fit” when asked for the reason of rejections.

My own reaction to this – despite my disbelief – is that I couldn’t believe it to be true. In my humble opinion this will cause a major outcry in the developer community and Apple will find it much harder in the future to find good programmer talent. Of course Apple will deny it and try to silence laid off individuals by threatening severe legal actions. And if you know Apple’s Legal Department then you are afraid of them.

It is because of this that I am asking you to tell everyone about this shady maneuver. We should not let Tim Cook get away with dismantling our beloved Apple this way. Social networking is not a crime and even less it can be likened to smoking. We should let Apple know that if they seriously will go ahead with the layoffs then we’ll all be switching to developing for Android. I know I will.

Update: April Fools!!! Sorry if I caused any actual Apple Employee’s to sweat and hastily delete their Twitter accounts.

Developers all around are struggling to update their ad network libraries as a reaction to rumored app rejections. It has been reported that apps which access the unique device identifier are getting semi-randomly singled out.

But, in light of recent revelations this apparently is not entirely true. Here’s a quick rundown of what is actually happening and what companies seem to be beginning to agree that the best solution is going forward.

This is Apple’s official statement. Well, the most official that one can find, from the documentation.

How nice of Apple to even suggest how to fix it. But we can read between the lines as to what their actual intentions are. According to these “Special Considerations” Apple sees a privacy problem with being able to uniquely identify devices. Rather they are stressing that one should create a UUID per app and store that in the user defaults.

That works fine if you control all the code that goes into your app. You can even share the user defaults between your apps if they have the same bundle identifier prefix, if I remember correctly. But there is also the case that the developer is trying to monetize his app via banner advertisements served through the plethora of available ad networks. This means he has to use code that they created to interact with their respective ad platforms.

The problem is that most ad network’s income is directly dependent on being able to track conversions. A conversion is the situation where an advertisement is shown and then the user taps on the banner. Or if the banner leads to the user buying an app on the app store. Imagine an ad for an app showing in your game, the user taps through, purchases and downloads the app. Then when he starts the new app for the first time this can also report that it has been installed on this device. This is valuable information being able to correlate an install and banner ad campaigns.

Ideally – from the point of view of the advertiser – we would get access to the Apple ID and be able to track those conversions per person. This is indeed how Google does it. Through your Google Single-Sign-On they know if you saw an ad on one machine, but then reacted to it on another. Other web banner networks would track “uniques” by setting one or more cookies with a GUID. In theory a cookie is limited to just the domain that set it, but due to the nature of HTML pages you can have one page trigger multiple sub-requests that also retrieve stuff from other domains. On every such request the server has a chance to inspect and set the cookies. Imagine the privacy problems that being able to track users across devices would entail.

So using the UDID was sort of an accepted fall-back. Most users would have a limited number of devices, like one iPad and one iPhone. So so the ad networks that meant tracking two identities based on these two devices’ UDIDs. Worked as advertised, pardon the pun.

But then Apple went and deprecated the uniqueIdentifier method. This means that in the next major iOS version it will no longer be available. If they remove it and not just make it private then this would also mean that apps accessing the property would crash with an “unrecognized selector” exception. Now it is perfectly normal in the software industry to wait until the last possible moment to come up with a fix if there is no obvious workaround.

And there really IS no obvious workaround for the dilemma of the ad networks. Those are generally a thorn in Apple’s side – competing with iAds – and thus they don’t get any free lunch. Apple clearly has the user in mind first and the developer with his apps second. Apple couldn’t care less about conversions, except those in happening via iAds.

We all took it for granted that all apps even accessing the uniqueIdentifier get rejected now. But that really does not seem to be the total truth. We know that Apple is scanning our apps for use of private APIs, so we all assumed that this is the same case in this situation. But then TapBots actually published the actual rejection letter they received from Apple.

Aha!

“To collect personal user data with your app, you must make it clear to the user that their personal user data will be uploaded to your server and you must obtain the user’s consent before the data is uploaded”

From this we can deduct that in the approval process Apple is also monitoring HTTP traffic initiated by your app. And since they know the identifiers of the test devices they can easily and automatically spot if any HTTP request contains this string. Now this case is quite obvious with the UDID being contained in HTTP GET URL itself, but I assume that sending it via HTTP POST and form-encoding it would have the same effect because HTTP inherently is a plain text protocol.

So the truth behind these rumored rejections seems to be the sending of the UDID to a server without having informed the user or asked for his permission. Think about it, there are so many other uses for uniqueIdentifier besides tracking conversions that Apple simply cannot blanket reject all apps using it. So it’s not by scanning your binary for the use of the deprecated API, because that would simply find too many false positives. But scanning network traffic is dead on.

In short: Apple does not want for the UDID to be transmitted outside of the circuits of the device.

Oliver Fürniß of Curious Times reported:

Great, Apple did NOT reject my latest update of HappyDayz! due to using the UDID (only used for Push Notifications on devices with iOS 3).

… which further proves my point.

But this relief comes a bit too late, as we can see from the reaction of several players who have been scrambling especially in the past 2 weeks to change to some other identifier.

• OpenFeint – implements SSO system and suggest to use this instead
• Appsfire - initiated OpenUDID initiative started 7 months ago
• MyID – a for-sale component with the UUID+private pasteboard implementation
• Ole Bergmann blogged 4 months ago, his solution is basically the same as Apple’s
• MobFox – switched to OpenUDID
• MoPub – implemented OpenUDID
• w3i – uses the Mac address
• Google/AdMob – doesn’t use HTTP so that Apple cannot inspect their network traffic

If you know any more to put on this list, please let me know in the comments.

Conclusion

Much of the commotion was a result from basing series of FUD articles on big-traffic sites on incomplete information. Unfortunately that’s something that’s occurring more and more frequently. AntennaGate, WarmGate, etc.

Of all the alternatives for conversion tracking networks the OpenUDID implementation seems to be the clear winner for now. But unfortunately this is still a patch on a big privacy wound that needs to be addressed. Ad networks need to change their business model away from performance tracking on a per-device basis. Users are NOT their devices.

Apple – always on the lookout for the user’s privacy interests first and foremost – does not want users to be tracked by unique device any more, but even less they like sloppy ad network code transmitting unique device ids as plain text without asking the user for permission.

From the statements made at the iPad !!! launch event we assumed that the A5X must be a beast, shattering all previous benchmarks made. There are various kinds of measurements that you can take to compare the new iPad !!! to its predecessors. For one the raw CPU power seems mostly unchanged as judged by looking at Geekbench which measures Integer, Floating Point, Memory and Stream performance.

Then there is the raw graphics performance which can be gauged with the GLBenchmark, there you see the iPad !!! shine, or at least sparkle a bit. Apple apparently optimized the hell out of that, people expect at least the same fluid frame rates on Retina when playing games as the iPad 2 had.

But when are you actually interested in raw computing power or raw OpenGL graphics power? What we are more interested in is how fast the iPad can take a file on disk, decompress it and display it on screen. We previously did a comprehensive Image Decompression Benchmark to compare all iOS devices in this regard. We now have the numbers for the new iPad, so let’s compare!

Arun Sirrpi from Australia was so kind to run our image decompression benchmark (available on GitHub) on his new iPad and recorded the numbers for us. This benchmark measures duration for 3 phases: alloc/init of the UIImage, decompression time, drawing time. This is explained in much greater detail in the previous article.

The numbers where, for iPad 2 resolution:

and for iPad !!! Retina resolution:

Based on these numbers we assumed that Apple would only launch a Retina-iPad if they can speed up image decompression by a factor of 2-4. The default loading image that is displayed when launching an app takes about 100 ms to decode and display on iPad 2. You can see that as the first bar in the “PNG Crushed” column. A Retina-sized default image would take 400 ms to display on iPad 2.

We figured, Apple would never release technology that would would feel that much slower. If they could quadruple the decompression speed so that also Retina-images can be displayed in 100 ms then – so we thought – it would feel just as fast.

4x, Yeah, Right.

Launch images are just one factor why image decompression performance is key for most modern iPad applications. Think of all the magazines and catalogues. Anything will full-page graphics is dependent of being able to decompress those and display them quickly. In an ideal world you would need less than 16 ms (60 fps) to decode and display a page. But neither the iPad 2 nor the iPad 3 are able to achieve that. Which is why we developers have to resort to all kinds of tricks (background rendering) to keep user interfaces feeling smooth.

Ok, I hope you get the picture and an idea of the methodology. Without further ado, let’s compare the actual numbers. We’ll look at 1024*768 and 2048*1536, same sizes for raw performance and Retina to non-Retina to compare the “felt performance”. We’ll compare 80% JPEGs because this is the compression factor that we found to be visually indistinguishable from uncompressed images for full frame catalog pages.

PNG Crushed, 1024*768 (init+decode+draw)

• iPad 2: 5 ms + 89 ms + 18 ms = 113 ms
• iPad 3: 1 ms + 50 ms + 18 ms = 69 ms

- 47%

JPG 80%, 1024*768 (init+decode+draw)

• iPad 2: 2 ms + 32 ms + 18 ms = 52 ms
• iPad 3: 2 ms + 32 ms + 17 ms = 51 ms

- 2%

PNG Crushed, 2048*1536 (init+decode+draw)

• iPad 2: 5 ms + 266 ms + 96 ms = 368 ms
• iPad 3: 2 ms + 171 ms + 66 ms = 238 ms

-33%

JPG 80%, 2048*1536 (init+decode+draw)

• iPad 2: 1 ms + 121 ms + 69 ms = 192 ms
• iPad 3: 1 ms + 122 ms + 66 ms = 189 ms

- 2%

So at first glance I must says that it does not look good for the 4x improvement we were hoping for. With a bit of good will we can give Apple a 2x improvement (-50%) that they claimed over the A5. But this good will breaks down when dealing with JPEGs, because it seems like not everybody at Apple got the memo. Crushed PNGs have an improved processing time of between 33% and 47%, JPEGs only 2%. If anything then that might just be from a slight improvement on SSD read times.

About “felt performance”, that is: does an app feel faster on the iPad 3?

Not so much, the initial launch image will display in 113 ms on an iPad 2, but take 238 ms on an iPad 3. If there aren’t any other optimizations – remember, the CPU performance is the same – then apps will take 125 ms longer to start on iPad 3.

The biggest problem that I foresee for iOS developers of magazines and catalogs is the “felt performance”. Even when using 80% JPEGs for the individual pages you only get 5 fps (128 ms per image) versus 19 fps (52 ms) for full screen images. This you would see as a jerk when scrolling from one page to the next if the developers are decoding and drawing the page on the main thread.

Conclusion

Now we know why the A5X is called like this. It is essentially the same CPU as an A5 with slightly improved graphics. The geek in us calculates X to be around 1.4. But only for PNGs. Or maybe JPEGs in an iOS update.

It is very possible that the part of iOS that is used for hardware-accelerating the decompression of JPEG images was somehow forgotten or was not ready for the initial iOS 5.1 version that comes pre-installed in iPad !!!, if this is the case we’d be getting a tremendous performance boost from 2% to 40% just like with PNGs. That’s a bit embarrassing to Apple, so we can assume that this won’t be discussed but rather snuck in under “various performance improvements”. #JPEGate

For us developers this should ring an urgent bell to develop techniques that can give us rich interactive magazines/catalogs without the need for full-screen images. How about packaging only the images and using a great open source framework like our DTCoreText for rendering the rich text instead? Just sayin’!

Apple today announced the new iPad, no suffix. Because of this we have decided to use 3 exclamation marks to tell it apart from the iPad 2. Oh wait, it didn’t say iPad 2 on the box either … looks like not everybody had gotten the “drop the number” memo last year. This time, they did.

So what are the news? Not so much of interest for us developers.

The new A5X (X for “Extreme”?) is a dual-core CPU with 4 GPU-Cores which are necessary to drive the @2x resolution (2048×1536). That still means that using GCD for background processing is a safe bet to make good use of the 2 CPU cores. But for manipulating graphics you will want to trust CoreAnimation and CoreImage which are most certainly optimized to make full use of the broader rendering pipeline for the GPU part of the System-on-a-Chip.

Oh and 4G LTE. Since LTE is designed to be a world standard it should work with all carriers that have upgraded their network. The Austrian product page mentions all 4 of Austria’s carrier as being compatible.

There – finally – is an update to the Apple TV !!! hockey puck. It can now handle 1080p movies and if you have bought anything on iTunes it will be upgraded to 1080p. Looks like AirPlay still only supports 720p though which might be because current WiFi bandwidth cannot handle 1080p.

The one thing that I see really falling on some people’s heads will be the extra amount of space that is needed if you want to have all pages of – say – a magazine as PNG images. That’s 4 times as much. Having 500 MB in a non-Retina-magazine (e.g. Wired) would easily need 1.5 to 2 GB. The amount of pixels might have quadrupled, but last time I checked my Internet connection still sucked.

One way around the waiting time for magazines is to have them on newsstand, because then they get downloaded in the background, while you sleep. Apple accidentally leaked information that there was a new Catalogs section on iTunes. Maybe – just maybe – there will soon be a newsstand for Catalogs as well? Or at least all these apps (40 of which use my iCatalog.framework) could be grouped together in one sections on the app store?

Warning: PDF will not cut it anymore

Either way I think that everybody betting on images needs to reevaluate their approach. We don’t know yet if PDF rendering can benefit from the new GPU with a factor of 4 as well. I fear not, because the format by itself is a collection of drawing instructions. I might be wrong but I suspect that this will still be mostly done on the CPU and only the compositing will happen on the GPU. There are only three feasable ways forward:

1. A PDF renderer that is using OpenGL shaders needs to be invented (or I am wrong)
2. Text will be drawn with CoreText, e.g. with my DTCoreText open source project to cut down on transmitted data
3. Downloading is completely decoupled from the UI to avoid having the user face the pain of having to wait for content

Finally iOS 5.1 has also been released just now. Since Apple is only pushing this via OTA update there were no release notes to be found at the time of this writing. The only item I remember from the BETA days were the new dictation APIs that you now can use to have voice input everywhere you like.

Some developers reported that their Xcode 4.3 downloads the 5.1 SDK automatically when they launch it. I have not been able to verify that as of yet.

Since there are no actual new technologies to speak of  right now, and WWDC probably being only 3 months away, we can safely assume that Apple has saved all the cool stuff for iOS 6. And since this is already showing up in some big website’s server logs that will probably be the hot topic this summer.

We are lobbying since 2009 to get Apple to publish a proper API for downloading all kinds of reports.

The first reaction we got was prohibition of ITC scraping. The second reaction was that Apple created the Mobile ITC app which unfortunately lacks any kind of possibility to get the reports out or get monetary amounts. The third reaction was a half-harted publishing of a Java class that is able to download daily and weekly sales reports.

This changes today, at least if you are like me and feel uneasy to use Java for downloading reports.

The DTITCReportDownloader project is a complete rewrite of the Autoingest Java class in proper Objective-C. This way we iOS and Mac developers can at least download these two kinds of reports without having to have a JVM installed.

Please support our cause by duping Radar rdar://6807195 which is still lacking any kind of response. I was told back in 2009 that “if enough developers wanted it” Apple would finally give us the API we are wishing for.

On GitHub: https://github.com/Cocoanetics/DTITCReportDownloader

Here are my mental notes for today’s earnings call…

Peter Oppenheimer, CFO

“Highest Quarter Earnings and Revenue”, ”All Time Highs”

3-4 Weeks Mac channel inventory

MAS: 100 Mio Downloads in less than a year

128% YOY grown in iPhone, “tremendous popularity of iPhone 4S”. Target range 4-6 weeks of iPhone channel inventory

available in over 90 country

iPads increase 111%, accessories grew 99%. Within 4-6 weeks of iPad channel inventory.

With iBook Author anyone can create “iBook Textbooks, Cookbooks, picture books and more”

> 85 Million customers on iCloud

Half of Macs sold in stores are to New Mac users

“Easy Pay” checkout process key in handling the amount of buyers in store

They are actively discussing on what do do with their cash balance, but nothing to announce yet.

Extremely enthusiastic about their product pipeline.

Tim Cook, CEO – Q&A

iPhone grows at 3 times of the mobile phone market

Sold more iPhones than they expected, so called “short in channel inventory”. Caught up in some countries, but not all.

Component environment is and will stay favorable, except for hard disks (Thailand). Did get better prices for displays, NANDs, DRAM last quarter.

iPad: hugh opportunity for Apple, tablet market will be larger than PC market. “Limited function and eReaders” are a different category and thus not a thread. Who wants an iPads gets one. They’ll “continue to innovate like crazy in this area.”

Team at Apple “so incredible”. “We feel very good about where we are”

5 Reasons why this quarter will be earning less than last

1. Dec quarter had a 14th week = 1/14th of the Revenue, DOH
2. A week missing in March Quarter that is usually going well
3. Last year they produced more iPhones
4. “significant pent up demand for 4S”
5. Strengthening of Dollar against the Euro

About acquisitions: Apple generally believes in totally integrating acquired companies into the mothership. “You will be assimilated, resistance is futile” (well at least that’s what I thought to myself)

“There was not an obvious aspect on the numbers” regarding if the Kindle Fire had any positive or negative effect on iPad sales. iPad cannibalizes the Mac, but much more cannibalizes Windows PCs.

Mac has outgrown market for 20 quarters in a row. Seems like all of the data make it a very close race against Android, iPad is way ahead. Though it’s hard to get any “crisp numbers” on Android handset shipments.

“iOS is doing extremely well”. Prefers to ignore the “other horses” and focus on innovating.

And when asked about larger screens and LTE we got usual response.

Imagine me getting a mani-pedi during the Christmas holidays. No, really! We have a lady come to our house regularly and doing all willing feet.

Somehow our casual conversion came to the iPhone. Now imagine this healthcare professional telling me:

“For me the iPhone is no option because it does not work with the gloves we use”.

One does not have to say THAT to me twice. This myth was begging to be busted.

First thing I tried out was one of the original Latex gloves. There was almost no difference in the ability of my iPhone and iPad detecting touches.

Can you imagine how belief-shattering this was when I showed it off to my witnesses? ”Oh my, then I had been told a lie!”

When I mentioned this finding on Twitter one of the responses was:

They’re probably thin enough. Regular gloves don’t work, unless they’re specially prepared.

Thicker. Hm, where do I get thicker gloves? Ah, my wife got these cleaning gloves made from rubber. Those only worked like 80%, you had to push slightly more than usual and also their rubbery surface made sliding over the display a bit awkward. But it still worked well enough for emergencies.

So thickness does not play a role either as this step 2 in our experiment showed.

John Blanchard told me:

“I recently noticed I can use my iPhone through my motorcycle gloves. Didn’t expect that!”

And here is picture proof of him using his iPhone with his real leather Stryker Gloves. They don’t even mention “iPhone-compatible” in the product description. Maybe they should!

I asked for other people to contribute photos of them using their iPhones with gloves. Hermano Queiroz was the second person to present photo proof of his gloves working with his iPhone:

Haha, very funny Hermano! We all know that you’re cheating on this photo. Clearly these are your wife’s fingers, not yours.

But Hermano also had this picture proof. He need 3 tries for that. On the first you could only see the screen showing my original tweet, but not the material of the gloves. The second only showed a blurry screen. The HDR setting finally got the best of both worlds.

Finally the coolest entry in the “show your gloves contest” did not involve gloves at all. Timothee Boucher mentioned:

I’m sure it would work with a Ziplock™ bag. I used that to still listen to and control Pandora while painting.

It just so happens that I hav such a bag at home, who doesn’t? I have been using it to waterproof my iPhone while walking the dog while it rains. In Europe these are sold by Toppits.

Here you see me aceing the final test:

If we learned anything from this exercise then it is that our iOS devices are even more amazing than we previously realized.

It is true that most material that are used for gloves won’t work. I tested wool and rough leather to no avail. But smooth leather has been proven to work on John’s gloves. Apparently there are a couple of elusive factors at work that are more complex than simply material or thickness.

This post would not be complete if I didn’t mention that – of course! – there are winter gloves with specially coated finger tips. These guys in Michigan have compiled an extensive list: Best iPhone, iPad & Android Touchscreen Gloves.

People just love to use their iDevices with gloves.

Apple owns patent US5946647 and slapped that around HTC’s team of lawyers successfully. Apple has previously sued HTC over them infringing 4 of their patents seeking to block sales of several Android-based mobile phones that HTC is making. On December 19th the International Trade Commission published their final determination as to the validity of two claims in this patent while finding no infringement on the others.

This result is interesting for us iOS developers for several reasons. For one it shows that something we are taking for granted was actually patented by Apple. They filed it on February 1st, 1996 and the patent was granted 3 years later on August 31, 1999. Usually patents are very elusive and it is generally hard to show how a device or operating system really infringes upon them. But in this rare specimen Apple has the rights on something that you probably see every day.

The second thing that fascinates me that in all the legalese that you find in the patent and ruling documents you can actually begin to see the outline of this mentioned technology if you know what you are looking for and know where to look. The final determination specifically mentions claims 1 and 8 of said patent. So let’s first have a look at what the patent is about and then share the experience of actually seeing that Apple is right in asserting their ownership.

Claim 1 is:

1. A computer-based system for detecting structures in data and performing actions on detected structures, comprising:

• an input device for receiving data;
• an output device for presenting the data;
• a memory storing information including program routines including
• an analyzer server for detecting structures in the data, and for linking actions to the detected structures;
• a user interface enabling the selection of a detected structure and a linked action; and
• an action processor for performing the selected action linked to the selected structure; and
• a processing unit coupled to the input device, the output device, and the memory for controlling the execution of the program routines.

Got that so far? There is some data that has has some structures in it and somehow actions are linked to that. Don’t worry just yet, it will be clear soon.

Claim 8 is much simpler:

8. The system recited in claim 1, wherein the user interface highlights detected structures.

Now the bell should be ringing! Let me visualize it for you:

Here the data is the plain text of the email, and the detected structures are an appointment (formulated in natural language) and a domain name. Both had been detected by iOS (a “computer-based system”) and turned into clickable links. Or in legalese: The “user interface highlighted these detected structures”.

NSDataDetector (available as of iOS 4) currently knows the following types, but you can add your own if you can put it into a regular expression as NSDataDetector is based on NSRegularExpression.

• NSTextCheckingTypeDate
• NSTextCheckingTypeAddress
• NSTextCheckingTypeLink
• NSTextCheckingTypePhoneNumber
• NSTextCheckingTypeTransitInformation

It’s very nice of Apple to provide this intelligent way of finding “structures in data”.

Did you have your DOH! moment yet?

Nowadays we are used to email and web pages working this way. Isn’t it extremely obvious? Users have come to expect a domain name to be clickable. But my iPhone was the first device that also turned phone numbers and dates into hyperlinks. The true feat of imagination is that Mr. Miller (and his 3 friends) thought of this 16 years ago, in the year that Windows 95 came out. It was sufficiently NON-obvious back then so that the patent was granted.

This patent being used to win the case against HTC might only be the first step. HTC claims to have a workaround they are scrambling to implement, but this workaround can only be to remove the auto-hyperlinking in Android apps, browsers and email clients. If Apple truly would want to be evil then they could now use this patent against any other product doing this broad sort of link detection: Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, even all sorts of editing apps that are modifying the text you input for your convenience, even blog engines like WordPress. There is a UI and there is code that detects and highlights. Bam!

When I shared my initial reaction to this online, people generally responded along the lines of “patents are bad, they stifle innovation”. And generally I do agree. I would abolish software patents in the blink of an eye if I could. But since they are a fact of current US business – that we cannot do anything about – I consider myself lucky to be focussing on Apple’s platform. Patents aside, Apple products generally DO win on quality. But it is also reassuring to know that Apple wields some patents that they are not afraid to use to protect the platform we depend on for our livelyhood.

Speaking of the general brokenness of the US patent system the lesson might be that often patents are granted that are not obvious at the current technical level we are at. But they might be commonplace 15 years from now. There needs to be either an expiration date or a re-evaluation process that un-grants patents that have outlived their uniqueness. Though that might still prolong the suffering of a dying patient. The patentability of UX needs to be abolished altogether.

I know I know, Documentation is a bad bad word, especially for us creative people. The true creativity is in writing code, not in writing comments, isn’t it?

Well, regardless, you might find yourself in the situation that you want other people to reuse your code. Or better yet, a different self of you in a year should be able to understand your line of reasoning of today. If you do programming for a longer time you will pass the phase of being shocked at how bad your code was and then get into the phase of having no idea what you where thinking. So a liberal sprinkling of comments can help you get up to speed on your old code.

I invented a technique of chewing on a portion of a programming puzzle where you comment almost every line of code as if you were to explain to somebody the steps in your ingenious approach. Maybe somebody else coined a term for this, for me it helps me sort my thoughts. And probably will do the same a year or ten from now. So commenting comes naturally to me, Documentation by Comment-ation is a logical extension to the concept.

Apple has nicely written documentation for their APIs though their process of creating it is hard to duplicate for us solo or small team developers. Apple has an entire department that writes the documentation the “Apple Developer Publications Department”, googling for them you can even find a two-year-old style guide for writers. Just consider this quote from it on page 6 just to see how much over our heads this “proper documenting” is:

“In general, follow the style and usage rules in:

• The American Heritage Dictionary
• The Chicago Manual of Style
• Words into Type

Exceptions to certain guidelines in these resources are noted in this guide.
In cases where reference sources conflict with each other, follow:

• The Chicago Manual of Style for questions of style and usage
• The American Heritage Dictionary for questions of spelling

Also refer to any department-specific materials provided by your editor.”

No way I’m going to start perusing a dictionary for my comments! And I guess neither will you…

Apple apparently is using the RenderX XEP engine to convert their own XML documentation to the nice PDF and HTML output you see online today. That’s the second reason why their process is out of reach for us.

Enter AppleDoc

One-person company Gentle Bytes saw our need for a simple and usable way to generate nice-to-look-at documentation from source code comments. So he started the AppleDoc open-source project in or around April 2009. It’s grown over 2 years and in January 2011 the version got bumped to 2.0. This is finally a full rewrite that no longer depends on Doxygen to parse the source code.

AppleDoc works such that it parses your source code and assembles the source comments in a structure strikingly similar to what we are used to from Apple. There is documentation as to how to construct your comments but I found it not very intuitive. So let me give you an overview and tutorial here as to what I learned to help you get up to speed as quickly as possible on using AppleDoc yourself.

Setup

You need to clone the AppleDoc Xcode project from github and build the command line tool. I assume that you have previously set up github on your development machine.

git clone git://github.com/tomaz/appledoc.git
cd appledoc
open appledoc.xcodeproj

In Xcode switch to the appledoc target and build it. You will see the appledoc entry in the Products group turn black.

Copy the appledoc command line utility to any folder in your path, I put it in /usr/local/bin. This way it is available regardless of what your current working directory is. To see that this is working and to see the appledoc help you can do “appledoc –help”.

Commenting Correctly

AppleDoc requires that you adhere to a certain style of commenting that is slightly different from the standard C comments you are used to, namely /* comment */ and // single line.

Classes and Categories

For every class or category that you are documenting, add one or more paragraphs of comments describing what the class is used for. This goes between the imports and the interface in the header file.

/** This class demonstrates AppleDoc.
 
 A second paragraph comes after an empty line.
 
	int i=0;
	i++;
 
 And some sample code can also be in a block, but indented with a TAB.
 */

Note the second asterisk on the opening of the comment. Paragraphs are separated by an empty line. All this text is parsed as markdown syntax, the inventor Gruber has an introduction. You can have sample code in the text as well, in it’s own block and indented with a tabulator. The above turns into a nicely formatted Overview section.

AppleDoc automatically turns anything looking like an Objective-C method into a cross-reference. That’s usually what we want, but will get you some warnings if you reference external classes in a sample block. See below how you can solve that.

Methods

The comment block before a  method (again in header) will be turned into the description 0f the method. The default behavior is to use the first paragraph for the short description and all paragraphs for the “Discussion”. I disabled this repeating of the first paragraph because I find that it looks weird to have the same text twice, not like Apple.

/**---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 * @name A name under which this method appears under "Tasks"
 *  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 */
 
/** This is the first super-awesome method.
 
 You can also add lists, but have to keep an empty line between these blocks.
 
 - One
 - Two
 - Three
 
 @param string A parameter that is passed in.
 @return Whatever it returns.
*/
- (NSString *)someMethodWithString:(NSString *)string;

The comment block with the @name serves for the grouping of methods in the “Tasks” section at the beginning of the page for the class/category. You should group similar methods under one such section, you don’t have to repeat it because the @name is good until the next one. You see that you can also have lists (numbered or not). You need an @param for each parameter of the method. If it has a non-void return value then you also need an @return to describe that. Omitting any of these will get you a warning.

You see that the first paragraph of the description ended up at the top, the rest of it including the list went to the Discussion part.

Some more bells and whistles are possible, shown here:

/** This is the second super-awesome method.
 
 Note that there are additional cool things here, like [direct hyperlinks](http://www.cocoanetics.com)
 
 @param number A parameter that is passed in, almost as cool as someMethodWithString:
 @return Whatever it returns.
 @see someMethodWithString:
 @warning *Warning:* A blue background.
 @bug *Bug:* A yellow background.
 */
- (NSString *)someMethodWithInteger:(NSInteger)number;

This shows cross references inline and via the @see tag. For external hyperlinks you put the link words in square brackets, the link itself in round ones. Finally you have a choice of blue or yellow box for warnings/notices.

Unfortunately there is no support for constants, enums and other things you might want to put in your headers, but it’s being worked on as we speak. For now you should probably put the possible values for an typedef’d enum in a simple list.

Building the Docset and HTML

Once you have added sufficient commentary as outline above you will want to build the documentation. AppleDoc primarily builds docsets which are essentially bundles with a bunch of HTML and xml index files. These docsets integrate with your Xcode for easy browsing and searching.

It took me quite a bit of tweaking until I got the parameters right to get the output I wanted. Also there are apparently some bugs that manifest themselves if you have some switches in the wrong oder. For quick building I set up a Documentation target where I added a “Run Script” build phase to execute this script. This would just as well work in a separate shell script, though you’d have to substitute the actual path for the PROJECT_DIR.

/usr/local/bin/appledoc \
--project-name "DTFoundation" \
--project-company "Cocoanetics" \
--company-id "com.cocoanetics" \
--docset-atom-filename "DTFoundation.atom" \
--docset-feed-url "http://cocoanetics.github.com/DTFoundation/%DOCSETATOMFILENAME" \
--docset-package-url "http://cocoanetics.github.com/DTFoundation/%DOCSETPACKAGEFILENAME" \
--docset-fallback-url "http://cocoanetics.github.com/DTFoundation/" \
--output "~/help" \
--publish-docset \
--logformat xcode \
--keep-undocumented-objects \
--keep-undocumented-members \
--keep-intermediate-files \
--no-repeat-first-par \
--no-warn-invalid-crossref \
--ignore "*.m" \
--ignore "LoadableCategory.h" \
--index-desc "${PROJECT_DIR}/readme.markdown" \
"${PROJECT_DIR}"

Here are my reasons for the various switches:

• project-name, project-company and company_id are standard
• the atom filename and the urls are necessary to let the docset know where it can get an update
• the output directory should be a place outside of your Xcode project. I found that having the generated documentation inside a github project does not make sense.
• publish-docset causes AppleDoc to generate the Atom feed and xar archive file
• logformat-xcode makes the output compatible with Xcode so that you get inline warnings
• keep-intermediate-files is necessary to preserve the original HTML output which you can put on your server for online reading
• no-repeate-first-par is the setting that does not duplicate the first paragraph into the discussion section
• no-warn-invalid-crossref omits the annoying warnings that you get when AppleDoc cannot find a reference to class or method
• we’re ignoring the .m files because otherwise AppleDoc would also try to get comments from these. We only want the comments from headers used also we don’t want the documentation say that a method was defined in the .h and the .m files which is unlike Apple.
• the LoadableCategory.h is another file we explicitly need to ignore, it is a dummy class that forces the linker to also load certain tagged categories. No use having that in the documentation.
• the index-desc is the path to a markdown file which additionally gets injected into the index page

The last switch is of special interest. Without it the index page of the docset is relatively barren. But since all of AppleDoc is based on markdown you can also re-purpose the readme file you usually have in the project root of your project as an introduction to the project. Write once, reuse: I’m loving it!

Publishing

AppleDoc will also install a generated docset into the same location where Apple’s docsets are residing. You can see these and install new ones via Xcode preferences, Downloads, Documentation tab.

You can add docsets on this screen via the plus button and by specifying the URL of the Atom feed. Remember, AppleDoc can generate this feed for you. If you leave the generated output in the publish folder around and update the project version then AppleDoc will add the new version to the feed file. So all you need is to copy the xar and the atom files to your web server after making sure that you specified the URLs correctly. This way somebody only needs to have the URL of the atom feed to install the docset.

The contents of the html folder in your output directory contain a full HTML site for the entire documentation. You can upload that to your web site as well, it is essentially the same content as in the docset. If you do, then people can browse the documentation outside of Xcode and you can also specify the URL there as fallback URL in your docset.

GitHub has a mechanism called GitHub Pages which you can enable via the admin area of every project. Once enabled you can put the web server files into a gh-pages branch of your open-source project. I finally got it working as well, but it is a bit weird having to constantly move around between the master and the gh-pages branch.

Conclusion

By adopting the described style of commenting methods and classes/categories you immediately reap the benefit of being able to generate beautiful docsets and HTML documentation. You can also inject your additional markdown files to enhance the index or even going as far as adding custom images and full HTML files. Development on AppleDoc continues – although slowly – and we’re looking forward to getting support for other things we’d like to document: notifications, protocols, enums and constants.

The main advantage of AppleDoc is that the comments also enhance your source code, so that even people without Xcode can read what you wrote. This way other developers benefit because they can look up your methods and see what your thoughts where. Often the availability of documentation is what many people use to decide whether or not they should add a dependency on your library or framework.

Finally it is yourself who will benefit in the long run because your commentary will allow you to understand what you where thinking many years ago. Don’t discount this possibility, we all get older all the time.

For lack of any other sensible field in Apples backyard to speculate on we are hearing multiple news sources and recyclers invest their brains in talking about a real Apple TV, as in TV-Set-style TV. All my favorite podcasts are full of it. And even Steve Jobs himself speaks to us from the grave via his biography where is quoted to have said “I’ve cracked it”, referring to an integrated TV-Set.

Not to be outdone, let me also add a bit of speculation, founded on some actual facts. Loops that Apple left intentionally open as if to telegraph their next moves.

For Apple this year 2011 marks the introduction of three new technologies, which are – unlike Apple’s usual approach – have not been proven before on the market.

In the hardware sector it was the Thunderbolt connection technology which aims to replace USB, Firewire and Display-Port all in one stroke.

In the networking sector they are betting big on iCloud as the ultimate solution for online-backup and cloud-services. This is by far the most important technology because not only did they build an extensive enormous data center for it, but also because until now Apple’s online services where quite lackluster. We don’t know for certain, but I am sure on many occasion Steve Jobs would have described them as “it sucks”.

The fifth generation iPhone had to be delayed until iOS 5 was ready because it is the embodiment of iCloud. Steve Jobs would not have them ship the new iPhone in summer on iOS 4 because of the importance of having an automatic cloud solution that “just works.”

Finally in the artificial intelligence sector Apple launched their first serious effort, named Siri. They kept the name because it is friendly and non-threatening. But here’s another anti-typical move: they launched it as BETA and limited it to just the top of the line iPhone model. It is rather likely that Siri will come to other iOS devices, but only when Apple has ironed out the kinks.

Apple has a high stack of chips on the table so that nobody seriously doubts that Apple will see their 3 bets through. But seriously there was little actual technical tangible innovation this year. All the teams where struggling to get iOS 5 out of the door, iCloud bolted down and Siri behaving more serious.

While this is perfectly understandable, iCloud, Siri and iOS 5 are BIG for Apple, it is not typical or them to devote all their resources exclusively on Software. It would be Microsoft which Bill Gates always described as a Software Company. Apple was always about controlling the experience end to end. So if what we saw in 2011 was the tip of the software tip of the iceberg then there must be an equal or larger amount of resources be pouring into hardware. But which? And where is it?

We might agree that the iPhone 4S is amazing or not, but it is a fact that it only contains technology which has been proven somehow before. The antenna and CDMA/3G world chip already came with the Verizon iPhone 4, the A5 SOC was in the iPad 2. It is almost as if they had an intern play with existing components just like one would with LEGOs.

iPad 2, second iteration of the improved MacBook Air, a couple of silent updates and a bit of Thunderbolt mixed in for good measure? Nothing truly new there. And even the recent silent update for the MacBook Pro seems to only be to token activity while waiting for the next big Intel architecture shift.

I see only two reasons for that: either Steve Jobs has given up on pushing the envelope even longer ago than we think. Or there really are three more years of Steve-blessed products in the pipeline, it’s just that the technology is not there yet. If technology is moving slower than Apple would like it to, then they put their resources into Software. With hardware they are dependent on what their suppliers can give them. With software they control it themselves.

To be fair, iOS 5 is not ONLY iCloud. As a matter of fact there are a boatload of other things in there that shows that they took this release as an opportunity to clean up quite a few old problems. But my point is that you do this kind of cleanup work when you know you have more time at your hands that you would need to ship in late Summer.

So there’s SOMETHING coming. Let’s inspect first what DIDN’T come even though it should have.

There are two glaringly obvious updates that are MIA so far for 2011: No new iPod Touch and no new AppleTV. Both currently have to make do with last years Apple A4 chip, even though they get the iOS 5 treatment.

The most obvious reason I can think of is that A5 is designed to be able to handle 1080p video (which was kept a secret so far because the iPad 2 did not have a built in camera capable of that). iTunes does not have 1080p video, all their High Definition refers to 720p. So an AppleTV with an A5 would be able to do something that the iTunes content engine cannot capitalize on. No advantage to the client = no go. Another problem is the bandwidth that it would take for iTunes to deliver 1080p. Instead of 1-2 GB per movie it would be more like 6-8 GB. Some people are blessed with never-ending bandwidth that would allow them to stream 1080p, but most of the globe has to work with like 4 MBit. It’s only recently that you see people having 20 MBits or more, but mostly in big cities.

On Apple’s side there was simply no way how to quadruple their bandwidth cost without first having their new datacenter in place. Also they would only launch 1080p video on iTunes if they have content for it and a business case. Which is fancy terminology for “charge more”.

Apparently there IS an AppleTV prototype sporting an A5 chip, it is internally called “AppleTV 3,1″ and traces of it can be found in iOS 5. But for the stated reason this will never see the light of day. Apple will rather continue to build the previous generation because now their margin should be in the 50% vicinity up from initially a meager 30%. And since it fulfills the customer needs perfectly at the perfect price point ($99), why would you prematurely change that.

I have shown in a previous post that the Apple A5 chip is too weak to be able to drive a Retina display, that is to shove 2048×1536 pixels on screen. Precisely the PNG decoding of a loading image has to be fast enough to happen in a bearable amount of time, and with the A5 it is not. This is why the iPad 2 does not do Retina yet, this is reserved for the A6 and the iPad 3, due in spring 2012.

Now consider the biggest display panels that Apple ever did so far. The discontinued 30″ HD Cinema display had 2560×1600 pixels. The current 27″ Thunderbolt display 2560×1440 pixels, which is essentially the same number of pixels as the cinema display, but they switched the aspect ration to 16:9 from 16:10 (from 25:16 even earlier) to accommodate the format that most TV content is actually presented in these days.

An A5 could not drive a current big Apple monitor even if it wanted to, but the A6 will be able to. Can you imagine Steve Jobs saying “That’s shit” two years ago when an engineer presented him with an Apple display (connected to an AppleTV2 prototype) that reduced the resolution for the TV part and had full resolution only when driven by a Mac?

There was another problem with too many pixels in the early days of large displays. To drive these you had to have dual-link capable DVI ports. That only improved with newer generation Macs and finally was resolved with Mini-Display-Port.

We now have wireless video going from iPad or iPhone Retina to displays. If the iPad 3 is supposed to be capable of the same then you will have to have the same SOC at the receiving (and displaying end). Do you think it is just a coincidence that iPad 3 retina resolution will be almost the same as large Apple monitors?

Speaking of chips, both the A4 and the A5 are manufactured with a features size of 45 nm. I bet you that the A6 will be the first built with 32 nanometers which was only cracked by other chip manufacturers quite recently. Intel’s famous Sandybridge  is the first big consumer chip that is manufactured like this.

But I digress …

It seems to me that Apple wants to have as many A5 chips available as possible to fill the massive uptake of the iPhone 4S this holiday season. A4 Apple TV: good enough. A4 iPod Touch: good enough.

The typical cost of a large Apple monitor has dropped to below $1000 and I believe that you will be able to select the AppleTV option for any new monitor you will buy from Apple in 2012, because the manufacturing cost of that will be around $60 which can easily be “hidden” in the total cost of a monitor, but add a great deal of extra value. I imagine that people would just buy these large monitors to put in a conference room or even their living room.

Most likely we will also see a resurgence of 30″ displays, the sweet spot for the living room seems to be 32″. Researching for this article I checked and it is next to impossible to buy a computer monitor with 32″, but that’s where most reasonable TVs begin. Take a look at this chart that tells you the ideal distance to place the sofa from your TV based on its diagonal size.

In my own living room I have a 32″ TV and we are sitting 8 feet away from it. So we are on the smaller side (could go up to 40″ reasonably) but I have no use for a large image. This TV can only do 1368×768, which is good enough for the PS3 or watching iTunes movies.

The reason for these distances is primarily because even though the size gets larger the number of pixels doesn’t because current material is limited at 1080p. So if you sit too close to a large TV then you see the individual points. So with a 32″ Apple monitor you could set twice as close as a regular TV negating the need for a larger panel. Apple would never make a monitor or TV that is too large to be carried home from your Apple store which also limits the maximum size to about 32″. For everything larger than that you will still get a standalone next generation “dongle” as the current AppleTV 2 is.

And there you have it, the AppleTV TV will just be a large Apple monitor with a built in A6 chip. Apple will never get into the fight with cable or satellite tuner boxes. Those you will simply plug into several available HDMI ports. Of course these will be HDMI 1.3 or higher, because that is the minimum standard to work with such a high res display. Probably HDMI ports: 1 for the TV box (cable/sat), 1 for a blue ray player, 1 for a game console. And of course a Thunderbolt port should you want to use this as a regular monitor.

Now for the ones who are planning to cut their cords, Apple is working on content deals to give us live news and sports which are the two killer apps for why people still think they need a TV set. Recently basketball and hockey appeared there, as well as WSJ. YouTube and Vimeo are also there. Getting there …

If you think about it then our TV has stopped being a TV when we connected a Sat or Cable box. Traditionally TVs where all about the built-in analog tuner. But who actually use his TV’s tuner any more? Our TV even has a DVB-T tuner, but there is no antenna cable plugged into it, because we have no interest in watching the handful of local TV stations. Instead we have a MacMini with an EyeTV and a Sat-Receiver. So that’s almost like an iMac, albeit with much worse resolution and no Apple-style user interface.

Apple removed Front Row from Lion because of this very reason. Nobody really used it because it it did not have the broadness and extensibility of the interface you now have in AppleTV. What would you say if an iMac you bought could sleep while the built-in TV part is providing a much better way of consuming media via the embedded iOS?

That’s why I think that we will see AppleTV integrated into not just Apple monitors but also into all future iMacs. This way people will get the AppleTV experience whenever they buy any Apple display device. Which the interesting benefit of people able to put it down as a business expense (“hey I bought a computer!”) while getting the entertainment and TV part for free. I can imagine that you have the iOS integration as a $50 option on the Apple store. Who can so no to that? You don’t want to miss out on AirPlay capability! (Not if there is no AirPlay for Macs, which there probably will never be)

Most people I know are done with migrating to HDTV-capable flat panels. Most are passing on the 3D-fad. And very few are expecting to see affordable 4K displays during our lifetimes let alone streaming such content over the internet. So why would anybody buy a TV-set that simply bears the Apple logo? And maybe dissolves the small TV dongle? We Apple fanboys buy everything that has the logo on it, but we are not THAT stupid, are we?

An Apple TV / iMac or Monitor-combo would also give us the benefit of bringing communication to your living room. A built-in FaceTime HD camera makes for good virtual family meetings with the grandparents, possible simultaneous watching of TV shows which seeing your loved ones in a picture-in-picture. Oh and if you really must type something, there’s the trusty Apple Bluetooth keyboard. Wireless audio over Bluetooth is also standard, so you can watch movies while the kids are sleeping. The big advantage of such a hybrid approach is that the built in devices would be available both to the TV part when this is active or to the Mac that’s connected when it is not.

This is how Steve Jobs can claim that “he cracked it”, the answer to the Apple TV-Set is NO TV SET. It’s a Mac or a smart Monitor! It’s totally ok to buy new hardware every 2 to 3 years, but you change your TV less often I presume than you do change Macs.

This answers the question who would want an AppleTV-TV. Everybody who is using a Mac as MediaPC. Everybody who wants to shrink his TV to reclaim this space in his living room. Everybody who is not using a built-in tuner. Everybody who is looking for an Apple-designed user interface to his entertainment and media. Everybody who wants to reduce the number of things in his life.

Apple apparently has begun to enforce a new rule when it comes to submitting new apps to the app store. You can no longer make an app for a client and submit it under your own developer account.

This is of consequence for two kinds of apps:

1. apps that are truly owned by the client of a contractor
2. apps that are owned by you but are branded or contain content under license from a third party

Often there are contractors who published apps under their own account because that saved the client from having to go through the process of establishing a paid Developer Program account.

For the first kind the situation until now has been possible that your client would not have had to have a paid developer account. Until now I’ve only had clients ask me to set up an account for them if they wanted or needed to have their name show as the seller of the app in iTunes. Basically out of vanity, from the point of view of the contractor, because having to deal with a new developer account for each client was a bit of a hassle.

The second kind is less obvious. Say you make a Coca Cola Snowglobe app but plan to publish this as yourself. You cannot – any more. Apple now would require you that Coca Cola has a paid development account with them and you have to submit it through this. Which would be fine if Coca Cola indeed is the owner of the app and you where contracted to make it. But what if you licensed the branding from CC and plan to sell the app through your account?

These new rejections (with reason “Program License Agreement”) refer you to the iOS Developer Program License Agreement, a copy of which can be viewed in your membership center, under “Your Account” and “Legal Agreements”. There it says in section 1.2 under “You”.

“You” and “Your” means and refers to the person(s) or legal entity (whether the company, organization, educational institution, or governmental agency, instrumentality, or department) using the Apple Software or otherwise exercising rights under this Agreement. For the sake of clarity, You may authorize contractors to develop Applications on Your behalf, but any such Applications must be submitted under Your developer account.

When I tweeted about the responses ranged from outrage to approval.

“This is correct in my opinion!” – Doug Diskin

“Makes sense to me. The app belongs to the client. What would previously happen if they choose a new dev for updates? new app.”- Jamar Parris

“Why were you publishing them under your account in the first place? it’s their app; they should publish it.” – Dave DeLong

“Bad luck. I wonder if it affect licensed content too, e.g many branded dictionary apps are licensed despite appearances. Not all clients want to create their own dev accounts.” – Andy Roberts

“You’ve caused quite the stir in my office.” – Zaid Choudhary

“Why only get one $99 dev account when they can get at least two at twice the profit?” – Lee Sibbald

“Ah so like if I develop an app for target, apple will balk at it.  Interesting.” – Jerel Rocktaschel

“Bastardos!” – Anonymous

“Considering you don’t have to pay for uploading apps I think it’s the least they can expect from devs. It must also cut down on brand fraud. I knew someone who would prefix his apps with Facebook because it supported Facebook!” – Richard Warrender

“Ok, so effectively if company A wants an application, it has to be published by company A’s developer account?” – Chris Ross

“My issues with them dictating third party business relationships aside, I agree with this one as a practice.” – Randy

Don’t get me wrong, I am not damning Apple because there are good reasons for this new policy. One is that generally it is next to impossible to transfer an app from one developer account to another. So removing it from one and submitting it on another makes it a new app. The other reason is that a corporation might want to change contractors or move the development in-house at some stage. The reason of vanity is also still valid, who wants the developer’s individual name to show as the Seller?

If you are actually the owner of the app but only licensed the looks or branding from a third party then you might find yourself doing the rejection tango. You will have to argue with the review team (or the higher authority the App Review Board) that the app is actually yours and that you are not just a contractor for it. You will – of course – have to produce the licensing agreement to prevent the problem of potentially infringing third-party-rights… but this is a different story.

Hearing how all these people report on queueing up for buying their iPhone 4S I got a urgent itch myself to scratch. So I asked if somebody could also get me one and lo and behold Cyril from France heard the calling.

Cyril Godefroy, maker of 321Run had only ordered one for himself so he graciously ordered mine as his second iPhone 4S. Ah, the French, how nice people they can be …

Last years unlocked iPhone 4 had come from the UK, because they only started selling these as unlocked some time later in Austria. This year’s price goes to France!

I had planned to wait with my order until Oct 28th which is when the Austrian Online Apple Store will carry them, but alas now I might even get it earlier than my fellow countrymen. Also since they are selling like hot cakes there is a certain danger that this date of availability is only theoretical if they run out of stocks before that time.

Thanks to Cyril I am right there with all the other pioneers!

Ben Lang commented in a blog post “Hey Apple, iOS 5 Needs Newsstand for Podcasts!”

The usual method to get Apple to do something is to file a Radar. So I did. I filed this feature request with number 10277643 to suggest a new business opportunity to Apple iTunes. It aims to establish a new model that would allow professional podcasters to offer podcasts under a for-pay subscription model to eliminate the need for advertising.

You are welcome to dupe the request or add your comments below.

Right now podcasts are treated differently than music:

• you cannot be a PING fan of a podcaster and follow him
• you cannot subscribe to podcasts in a way that would get my episodes automatically delivered
• there is no business model that Apple offers for compensation. Due to this most podcasting networks have to have annoying advertisements to finance their operations.

I propose to elevate iTunes podcasts to a premium distribution channel for professional podcasters. The option for publishers would be to make podcasts dependent on an iTunes subscription (monthly, annually) and have the content optionally be FairPlay encrypted.

The free option would still be available, though it would lack the convenience of auto-delivery. The idea is to make such a service so attractive to iOS users that they would be willing to pay a couple of dollars subscriptions for each feed just for the convenience.

You create APIs that allow developers to enable background downloading of podcast episodes just like Newsstand. It would then be in the Publishers best interest to direct their audience to get an iTunes subscription or else they won’t get the content. Apple would earn 30% of this just like with everything else.

Of course this would integrate with iCloud, which would maintain a shared database which episodes of which feeds have already been listened to and how much. So you could have a built-in podcast player (iPod) on your iPhone to start listening and then continue to listen on your AppleTV from where you left of.

Just like with Music the local iTunes teams would then also curate the best premium podcasts and feature select channels to the audience.

I believe that by tying in the social media creation power of the internet coupled with the convenience of iTunes and iOS can enable a new broadcasting revolution.

Most iPhone developers start up next to a full time employment by getting signed up for the Individual iOS Developer Program. For my recent workshop I researched the various kinds of programs that Apple offers and what the differences are.

I omitted the column that was titled “Registered Developer” since it did not have any  benefits besides being able to download the current stable Xcode version.

Here is an overview of the subtle differences and how I got my Individual account changed to a Company account.

I took the comparison available on Apple’s website and made a nicer table out of it, you might want to bookmark this for future reference.

As an Individual you get access to BETA software, get 2 tech incidents, and can test on device, do ad-hoc and app store distributions. You are limited to 100 devices which you can provision per year.

The University program is only good for creating teams of developers who then will be able to test stuff on their devices. This is available for Free because Apple loves Edu.

The Company and Enterprise options are almost identical with the only difference that enterprises are able to do unlimited in-house distributions but cannot put apps on the app store. Company program members on the other hand can also only have 100 devices, but have the benefit of being able to publish apps on the app store. If a big corporation needs both options (in-house AND app store) then the only way to get that is to sign up for both programs. Apparently you may combine them.

Individual and Company are virtually identical as well, with the only difference of Company being able to create developer teams. Even the price is the same. So what is this “Create Teams” and why would I need that?

Well, if you work with more people than just yourself you also want these other team members to be able to provision their devices and test on them. And that’s what this gives you. You can invite their Apple ID to join your development team. The question at hand is, why does Apple make this distinction and what is needed to reap the benefits of the Company account?

Apple does not care what kind of business you have registered if it is only a single-person-endeavor. You need to have a company to be eligible for the Company program, company as in “multiple people”. A sole proprietor or “person company” (sometimes also e.U.) does not qualify because he is just by himself legally, i.e. an Individual. In Austria you have various kinds of companies that do qualify: OG, KG, GmbH and AG. As a rule of thumb, if you needed more than a single person to found it or there was a certain amount of capital necessary for the founding of the company then it works. The proof for your legal standing as a company is a copy of the company registration which you have to fax to a dedicated phone number in USA. Yes, you heard me right, they won’t accept an e-mail with a scan.

To simplify the work flows of several developers around me I decided to have my Invididual account be changed into a Company. To do so I called Developer Program telephone support for my country. The process has been streamlined so far that you can get the migration started right away. They warn you that your provisioning portal will not be accessible for up to a week during migration.

There is no extra payment to make, your annual membership fee of $99 has already been paid. Once they kicked off the migration you receive an e-mail with a link asking you to complete your enrollment details.

You see that this again tells you that the Company Program is intended for: Team Development and App Store distribution. Next you fill in some account info and the company profile which includes the company address and phone number.

The last step before the first wait informs you about your new Enrollment ID. This is the actual identifier you need when communicating with Apple, sort of like and ID for your legal entity if you will. This new identifier replaces the previous one you had as an Individual. This also tells you that you will be contacted via e-mail to prove your company status.

After a brief wait I received an e-mail to fax my company registration document to a number in the US and also specify the new enrollment ID plus company telephone number on the fax. Thankfully my tax advisors possess both a copy of my company registration as well as a fax machine. So I asked them to do me this small favor or faxing it. It’s a bit weird that there is no HTTPS-secured place that would accept an upload but that’s just the way it is.

And that’s were we’re at right now, I will add to this blog post as further developments happen.

Markus Mueller (of Mindnode) points out that getting a new Enrollment ID is a bad thing if you already have iCloud integrated because this invalidates any existing iCloud containers. Apparently this identifier is part of the address of space reserved for one user and one app.

Update Oct 13: An e-mail arrived: “We will provide you with details about the next steps once we have processed your updated documentation.”

Update Oct 17: I phoned the Developer Support again, wanting to ask something about the VAT, only to find out that Apple did not like what I had faxed to them. The company register has to come from an official source instead of being just a copy from the internet. Will mail another version I have to the later. If you insist enough and stress that you know that you are doing it “at your own risk” then they will let you mail a scan.

Shortly thereafter I received another quite friendly phone call telling me that my paperwork is now in order. Minutes later I received a link to the next step in the enrollment process, accepting the agreements.

And finally a large green checkmark gives you a good feeling. It’s a bit weird that the green progress bar backtracked but the enrollment process was as complete as can be.

Another confirmation of the success comes via e-mail which informs you that:

Your iOS Developer Program License Agreement has been successfully assigned to Drobnik KG, per your request. You can now access team features that were not available to you as an individual, including:

• The ability to invite people from your company to join your development team.
• The option to assign Team Admin privileges to other members on your team.
• The ability to monitor and approve development certificates.

So to check this out I logged into my member center which has adapted its look and lets me now invite people to my development team.

Heureka! (And a big sigh of relief)

Even with this brief hiccup on the company documentation the whole process was over and done with in 5 days total.

One more thing … you have to update all your contracts, contacts, tax information and payment account. This is because you get new contract numbers for the company account.

Just wanted to briefly share with you that Audible.com is now also giving into Apple’s much criticized app review guideline that forbids linking to a web-based shop from within your app:

11.13 Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app, such as a “buy” button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected

Audible just e-mailed their customers explaining their workaround. I am posting this because it is an example of how you can work around this annoying restriction.

Audible writes:

Dear Oliver,

We’d like to update you on a change to the Audible application that affects the way that you access the Audible mobile store. In order to comply with recent policy changes by Apple, we’ve removed the “Shop” link from within the app that opened your web browser and took you to the Audible mobile store.

You can still shop the mobile store, and we’ve created a “Shop Audible” icon that you can add to your home screen so it’s always one click away. To do this, launch your web browser on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, go to mobile.audible.com, and follow the instructions to “Add to Home Screen”. You can watch a quick video to walk you through the steps, or call us at (888) 283-5051 if you have any other questions.

That’s it. The link is gone, but everything else is the same. You can still shop the store, and all your books will still be available in the app.

Thank you,
The Audible Team

In addition to the e-mail they also provided a video guide:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKWLL7tnmUs

This way Audible can continue to update their app which otherwise the app review team would continue to reject. It is a weird policy but unfortunately there is no other way to get around it.

There’s been much brouhaha – especially by the German media – about how disappointed everybody is about the iPhone 4S. No new look. Only better camera and better CPU. Ah and there’s this voice recognition which Android’s been having for years.

I beg to differ, massively. I am stoked, ecstatic about the iPhone 4S. Let me share my thoughts on why this move by Apple makes perfect sense and why not just iPhone newbies and 3GS owners will buy it.

The main argument in favor of the 4S has been a rather weak one: “iPhone 4 users will not purchase the 4S because it is not substantial enough an update. The 4S is appealing as upgrade to current pre-4 users (2G, 3G, 3GS) and for users for which this will be the first Smartphone.”

I kind of felt left out by this hypothesis, being proud owner of all iPhones there have ever been. We have a strict hand-me-down policy in our house. I get the latest hardware – “because I need to test on it” – and my wife gets the previous model. Also, I don’t pay VAT and can depreciate devices as a business expense. So it makes more sense for me to buy non-subsidized unlocked phones.

I had bought my iPhone 4 in UK, shortly before they started selling unlocked iPhones in Austria. And when the two years contract of my wife’s 3GS was over I had this as well as the 3G unlocked by my carrier. Unfortunately AT&T continues to refuse to unlock original iPhones, so my museum has a 2G iPhone that’s jailbroken. Actually the in-laws are using this as mobile phone and e-mail client.

I wanted to know how you other developers are feeling about this strategy and so I did a Twitter Poll.

Pundits are argumenting that the iPhone 4S is only appealing to the 50% of iPhone users that have a model prior to iPhone 4. What do you think?

Granted, my followers on Twitter are biased, they are mostly iOS developers. But the overwhelming response was that the above stated theory does not hold for them. Only 16% agree with it. 62% are buying everything Apple releases anyway, even without a wife to hand something down to (or because there IS no wife). 22% – not something to sneeze at – are practicing the same hand-me-down strategy as me. Only 10% agree with the “not sufficiently different” option.

I think that this clearly debunks the myth that no iPhone 4 user would find the iPhone 4S appealing for himself.

There are some variants of course – some guys are putting themselves in line behind their life partner, but the basic idea stays the same: One gets the 4S one gets the 4.

I won’t bore you with the technical reasons why the 4S is a true 5th generation iPhone, but instead list a couple of non-obvious reasons why Apple is smart to do it like they are:

• Apple likes to keep the packaging of any product around for two or three iterations. See for example the MacBook Air. With this strategy they increase customer satisfaction because you don’t fell like you have old crap once the shiny new device arrives. By making anything visually similar to the predecessor you are communicating that the previous generation is great too. So when people see my MacBook Air, they think “aha, a MacBook Air, this cool and light new MacBook”, instead of “this poor guy has an old model”.
• Half of all iPhones sold so far have been iPhone 4, so clearly people must like the form factor and packaging. Why would you want to disappoint these people? Why would you want to completely change something that works? “Never change a winning team!”
• Makers of accessories get a longer use out of custom-tailored solutions like the Glif, a mount that lets you fix your iPhone 4/4S onto a standard tripod. And thus people like myself who have such accessories can continue to use them. This might put a dent in manufacturers’ plans who where hoping for their products to be obsolete after a year, but for Apple the accessory business is only an afterthought.
• The main mobile Apple products this year is iCloud and they are betting the farm on it. iCloud is the main new tech in iOS 5. Apple knows that they will get more acceptance for iCloud if new devices have it pre-installed, especially because it makes setup PC-free. Since iCloud was not ready in Summer they had to postpone the next-gen iPhone launch until now.
• Siri is just about as revolutionary a technology that they can add to the iOS experience without distracting too much from iCloud. All of iCloud’s features will also be coming to 3GS and 4, so Siri was thrown in for good measure to make the 4S be more attractive. It’s the poster technology that people can see and be excited about, because the improved hardware performance can not really be seen and demonstrated.
• Apple is interested to make FaceTime the standard for video calls on iOS. Every conversation needs two devices. Are these more likely to be two iPhone 4 or is it more likely that it will be subsequent generations? I would say the latter, due to the hand-me-down-syndrome. By upgrading my wife to my current iPhone 4 she gets FaceTime and we finally can use it whenever I am away on speaking engagements.
• iOS devices had a major shift in performance when Apple moved to their own custom silicone. By having the second generation A5 SOC power the iPhone 4S Apple can further validate this approach. They needed to use the A5 in a phone to leverage all the development and tuning that went into creating it. This is why they used existing design and completely reworked the electronics.
• The 6th generation iPhone will have to have the same CPU as the iPad 3. And since the iPad 3 is likely to have a Retina display they cannot use the A5 for that because they need to increase the graphics power by yet another factor of 4 to drive as many pixels. This means that the next generation jump is not ready yet, because the A6 is still on the drawing board.

I am making the argument that Apple’s strategy is very logical, calm, understandable, even predictable. They are giving us sufficient arguments to purchase the iPhone 4S from whatever iPhone we currently are on, even iPhone 4.

For a device that nobody wants don’t you think it is odd that that would sell out the initial alotment so quickly?

Steve Jobs was never one to leave anything to chance. He even timed his own ascension to a higher plane to fall on the day after the 5th generation iPhone was publicly unveiled.

Mr. Jobs will be missed. The kind of biological problems that shortened his life span are no way to go for a tech god. If only medicine had developed at the same pace that he furthered the digital lifestyle, then I am sure we would have lived longer. But alas the working of miracles is still only the domain of iOS devices and Macs.

I never met the genius Jobs in person. I only walked past him once in the lobby of the Apple campus without noticing him. Only to be nudged afterwards “Did you see Steve? He was sitting with Jony Ive”. I saw him later at his last public appearance, the WWDC 2011 keynote. Back home whenever somebody asked me “he didn’t look good, did he” I enthusiastically defended him claiming that I thought he looked ok, just to keep this cherished memory untainted.

Jobs’ influence in our lives was so much more than another star would have just by acting a role and existing. Yes, I am trying to copy his approach to things, to designing, to iterating, to improving your products. But if he wouldn’t have set his mind to creating the iPad then he would never have taken the detour to creating the iPhone. Which in turn was the reason why I started developing iOS apps in late 2008  in the first place. Now I am doing that full time since 2010 and the entirety of my livelihood depends on the ecosystem that he and Apple have created.

Isn’t it a weird coincidence that the authorized biography (amazon.com, amazon.de, iBookstore) will also be available a mere month after today? Perfect timing. Food for those of us lusting to get closer to this brilliant person, something we never could due to his looking out for his and his family’s privacy. Here’s to hoping that some molecules of brilliance might find their way from Steve’s essence via this book into our own humble brains.

If it weren’t for Steve Jobs then I would still be a grumpy Windows desktop support engineer at Amdocs. Or maybe Linux system administrator. Steve’s legacy is what allows me to live a life that I control, that is fun, with a job that I can be proud in. We have not a single Windows machine in our house (but 5 Macs, 4 iPhones, 3 iPods, 2 iPads). Thank you Steve!

I shall wear black today. Though I don’t have a mock turtleneck, a black T-Shirt will do. I have a choice between one with an Apple logo and one stating “I visited the Apple Campus, but that’s all I’m allowed to say”. Speaking of controlling your secrets…

Enlightened meditators are said to be able to control the time when they let their soul leave their body through the third eye. While we will never learn the specific circumstances of Steve’s EOL let us assume that this was his last executive decision: To leave on his own terms.

Thus Steve Jobs launched himself onto iCloud Number 9, the all-encompassing Backup system for the soul.

Steve, may the Force be with you

Apple CEO Tim Cook gathered a handful of select journalists into the so-called “Townhall” room at the Apple HQ in Cupertino. Interest in this event had reached a fever pitch with most of the world expecting a new iPhone to be launched, “iPhone 5″.

It so turns out that there WILL be a new iPhone, but as if to mock the pundits it is not called number 5, but 4s. But first – while everybody started getting nervous – Cook and team told us how well Apple is doing.

Let’s review the important announcements.

Two new stores (6 total in China alone) are serving as a poster child on the enormous momentum Apple has been gathering in Asia.

OSX Lion has been downloaded over 6 Million times so far, 80% more than the predecessor. It reached 10% user adoption in 2 Weeks, a tenth of Windows 7 (20 Weeks).

Year over Year the Mac outgrew the PC market by almost 6 times (23% versus 4%) and this has been going on for 5 years now. Macs have now around 58 Million users worldwide, giving it 23% market share in the US.

The iPod was launched 10 years ago and became the #1 music player, over 300 Million iPods have been sold so far. 45 Million in the last year, half of which were purchased as the first iPod. “This remains a very important business to [Apple]“.

“iPhone, this could be the reason why the room is full today”. More than half of all iPhones ever sold have been iPhone 4 making it the most sold smartphone. Generally owners of an iPhone 4 are more satisfied with they device than any other mobile phone. 5% of all phones sold (not just smartphones) are iPhones. Apple is not looking at smartphones only because they think that all phones will become smartphones over time.

iPads are showing up in education, airplanes, hospitals, etc. “from the board room to the back room”. 92% of Fortune 500 companies are testing or deploying iPads, the top selling tablet. 74% of tablets sold in the US are iPads. “Consumers don’t want tables, they want iPads”

Apple has reached the 250 Million iOS devices sold mark. Market share is now at 43%(Android 33%, RIM 17%).

iOS also accounts for 61% of mobile browsing, so apparently customers like the experience. More than a billion apps are now being downloaded per month.

Scott Forstall then launched the new Cards.app which allows you to create greeting cards on your iPhone, Apple will print and mail it for you to a physical address. $2.99 in the US, $4.99 mailed wordwide. It is unclear whether this app will actually be available for customers outside of the US.

iOS 5

Next up, iOS 5, Forstall highlighting some features out the the 200 new user features:

• Notification Center – no longer are push notifications getting on your nerves
• iMessage – you can send text, photos, videos, pushed over 3G and WiFi to all your devices
• Reminders  - they can be location based
• Twitter Integration – now in many of built-in apps
• Newsstand – Magazine apps are now in one convenient location, supporting background downloads
• Camera – quick access via lock screen shortcut, use volume up button to snap, tap to lock Auto-Exposure/-Focus, Editing
• GameCenter – Photos, Achievement Points, Friend discovery, Game recommendations
• Safari – Reader cleans up any web page and makes it perfect for reading, or read it later via Reading List, Tabbed browsing
• Mail – Rich text formatting, Draggable addresses, message flagging
• PC Free – setup and updates now possible without the need for a computer

iOS 5 will be publicly available as a free download on October 12th.

iCloud

Eddie Cue presented iCloud:

• music, TV Shows and movies are also accessible everywhere
• Photo Stream: pictures you get synched
• Documents in the Cloud: your files are following you to all your devices. Apple’s own iWork apps will bring iCloud integration on Oct 12th
• Apps and Books are also available for all your devices
• Backup to the cloud
• Contacts, Calendar also synch
• Ad-Free me.com Mail account
• Find my iPhone

The new Find my Friends app shows you family and friends who share your location with you. You can either share permanently or set up a temporary event after which the location sharing stops automatically. Parental controls allow for forcing location sharing on their offspring and control who may know their location.

iTunes Match allows you to legalize your whole pirated music collection at an amazing price: $24.99 per year subscription. It scans and matches your library against iTunes music. What it does not find it uploads. And then you can stream all your music on any of your devices.

iCloud will launch the same day iOS 5 launches, October 12th. iTunes Match at the End of October in the US and they are working on adding additional countries before the end of the year.

iPod

Phil Schiller presented the updates to iPod Nano:

• made it easier to navigate
• Nike+ can now track not just walks but also runs with the built in pedometer
• 16 new clock faces for people who like to wear it as a watch

The most popular iPod is the iPod Touch:

• most popular music and game player
• gets iOS 5 and iCloud
• “Free & Unlimited with WiFi”
• now also in white

Both iPods are getting slightly cheaper.

It appears that the iPod classic is no longer in the picture.
After 52 minutes we finally got to the interesting part, the new iPhone.

iPhone 4S

Outside the same as the iPhone 4, inside completely redesigned.

• A5 Chip, same as in iPad 2. Dual core, 2x faster than A4, 7x faster graphics
• improved 3G talk time to 8 hours, 2G talk time 14 hours, 10 hours video, 40 hours music
• redesigned wireless system “intelligently switches between two antennas to transmit and receive”, even while on a call
• download speed 2x with HSDBP up to 14.4 Mbps (versus 7.2 on iPhone 4), 5.8 Mbps upload – competitors are calling this “4G”
• a world phone, now combining GSM and CDMA into one phone
• camera greatly improved, now 8 Megapixel (3264×2448 = 60% more than iPhone 4) backside-illuminated CMOS sensor with new optics (5 lenses), hybrid IR filter for better colors, wider aperture (f/2.4) for better low-light performance
• Signal Processor on A5 can do face detection of up to 10 faces, fast photos. 1.1 seconds to first photo, 0.5 seconds to next photo.
• Video recording now 1080p, digital image stabilization (using the gyro sensors), temporal noise reduction
• AirPlay Display Mirroring – over WiFi or cable

Of course all with iOS 5 and iCloud integration out of the box.

Siri Digital Assistant

The best feature not mentioned so far is called Siri again demonstrated by Forstall. “Your intelligent assistent that helps you get things done just by asking”

You activate Siri by holding down the Home button. Then you ask a question like “what will the weather be like today”. Siri figures out the meaning of your question gives a short answer and shows you some details.

This is very useful to ask questions which you would have to tap quite a bit to get to otherwise. Like asking what the current time in another city is. This feature is both integrated with most of the built-in apps, as well as some external services, like for example Yelp to find restaurants.

When in your pocket you can have Siri read messages to you. Siri keeps context so that subsequent questions can be answered more intelligently. You can check your calendar, schedule meetings, reply all hands-free. It also learns for example who “my wife” is.

Searching is integrated with Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha. So you can search for terms in Wikipedia or get answers like “how many days until Christmas”.

Siri also allows for dictation into any text field that shows a keyboard. There is a new microphone icon to the left of the virtual space bar for that purpose. Dictation is done on Apple’s server (over 3G and WiFi) as opposed to voice control which happens on the device.

It launches in English, German and French and they specifically stated multiple times that it is BETA. Meaning that they don’t feel it is fully done and will be adding more languages.

Unfortunately there is no public Siri API for apps just yet even though there must be a private API that powers Apple’s built-in apps. We were told to file a Radar for that by a developer working for Apple.

Conclusion

“iPhone 4S is the most amazing iPhone ever.”

Apple is keeping the iPhone 3GS (8 GB) as a free option (with contract) for providers, iPhone 4 will be available only with 8 GB for an entry price option and the iPhone 4S will be the premium phone.

With this line up Apple hopes to have an iPhone for every kind of customer segment, hoping to steal more market share from the entry-level priced Android phones.

iPhone 4S launches in US (Sprint too!), CA, AU, UK, FR, DE and JP on October 14th. 22 more countries (including Austria) on October 28th. By the end of the year in over 70 countries.

So we actually did get a next generation iPhone, it is just not called iPhone 5. With the new iOS version and iCloud and the broadened lineup Apple is definitely out for broadening the footprint of their products in the market.

My congratulations to all these happy wives who will now get a handed down iPhone 4. And congratulations to us iOS developers who see their platform flourish and finally get a shiny new toy. We have not even scratched the surface of the kind of synchronization and features that iCloud makes possible and easy for us.

Overall Tim Cook did a good job as new Apple flag holder. I wish for him to get a bit more relaxed and humorous in the future, he was somewhat stiff and overly serious as compared to the other speakers. But nothing a bit of training could not fix. Apple is safe.

With the iOS 5 looming there are a couple of items that you will need to look at to have your apps ready for the public availability of iCloud and the OS. Let us review.

iCloud will back up app’s documents folder and also reinstall apps over the air. Apple has been testing published apps for how much data they put in the documents folder. With apps where they found the usage excessively they emailed the developers to remedy this until mid of October.

Users have only 5 GB free iCloud storage and we cannot have developers eating this up with unnecessary files. So what is truly necessary to be put in the documents folder? Documents!

Documents! Documents! Documents!

Documents are all files that contain user generated data that cannot be recreated or downloaded. Imagine turning on iTunes file sharing: which files would you like the user to see in iTunes? Dozens of cached images? Plist files with settings? Probably not. The user should only see the actual documents he created.

Since you have to clean out the documents folder anyway, why not also add iTunes file sharing now as a bonus feature to your users?

There are two other locations that don’t get backed up. The tmp and the Library/Caches folder for your app are located right under the application folder on disk. In tmp you would put temporary files that you remove after you are done with them. In Caches you put everything that is cached to speed things up. Like magazine content or downloaded images.

This leaves us with on type of content that we don’t yet know where to put: user data that we WANT backed up, but don’t want the user to see in iTunes, possibly because it is a CoreData DB or some other proprietary representation of the data.

The place to put this is in your own custom folder under Library. Going with the traditional Mac naming scheme you could name it “Application Support”. Or you can name it anything you like. Any folder under Library that is not named Caches will be backed up.

At this point you might also want to review if it wouldn’t make sense to keep the document data in file bundles in documents instead of having them in a centralized DB. iOS 5 brings us a structured method to deal with documents and document versions: NSDocument on Mac and UIDocument on iOS.

Granted, that does not apply to iOS 4 compatible apps, but you could still keep the documents as bundles (i.e. Folders with an app-specific extension). If you start a new app you should plan with this document model right from the start.

Legal Problems?! WTF?

The other thing that confused my developer was a question you would have to answer when submitting a new app version. Are you updating your app because of legal problems? What sort of bullshit question is this?

It is not as bad as it sounds and it does not at all have to do with Lodsys. Apple is using this information to know if they can allow users to install certain older versions of your app. Say you had a problem where you infringed on “third party rights” with something in your app 1.0. You submit a new version 1.1 that replaced the infringing content. By specifying that you update because of a legal problem with 1.0 you tell Apple that they should no longer allow users to install 1.0. It’s just to protect YOU from legal problems by only allowing users access to the trouble-free newer version.

One thing we don’t know is if it is really possible to downgrade apps to earlier versions, but this mechanism certainly suggests that this will be the case. At least Apple now has a flag in their Database which app versions are ok and which have problems.

And now you also know what this is about. Usually you want to answer this question with NO, but in the rare case that there was a legal problem with earlier app versions you choose YES.

Container View Controllers

Your app might contain containers, that is customized view controllers that are providing similar functionality as e.g. UITabBarController or UISplitViewController. Until iOS 5 that was always a nasty hack because you did not have access to the native mechanism of forwarding rotation and presentation events.

One thing you should review now is where you can replace the ugly hacks with the now-available public methods. If you are keeping iOS 4-compatibiliy then you can make this dependent on the iOS version the app is running on.

Ideally you will end up with two hierarchies: a hierarchy of view controllers and a hierarchy of views. Never should you find that you are adding a view that belongs to one view controller’s hiererchy to the view hierarchy belonging to another.

Under iOS 4 it was fine to create a standalone view controller and add it’s view to your main view controller hierarchy which has it’s top in the window’s rootviewcontroller. Under iOS 5 this additional view controller should also be a having a parent view controller.

If you at all tested your apps under iOS 5 (and built against the iOS 5 SDK) then you will definitely have seen some exceptions happening because of this intermingling of hierarchies.

Speaking of Hacks…

Another plethora of hacks is related to customizing the look of your app. Did you by any chance override the drawrect of UIToolbar or UITabBarController via category?

If the answer is yes, then you have two steps to perform. Get rid of category hacks on standard UIKit classes first. If you must, you can subclass them and override it there. The second step is to make your custom code dependent in iOS 4 and use the new appearance customization methods available in iOS 5.

There are other hacks which cannot be substituted as easily. For example you can no longer modify the delegate of an UIScrollView’s native gesture recognizers. If you had to do that you have to rethink your gesture strategy as this now causes an exception (i.e. your app crashes)

3.2 be GONE!

I previously reported on how it makes almost no sense any more to support 3.x devices. The launch of iOS 5 should give the final death blow to this old old OS version.

If the past is any indication we can assume that we have around 6 months now until the majority of users will be on iOS 5. So there will be a big market for solutions that can dynamically work on iOS 4 and still use the specific enhancements of iOS 5.

But iOS 3.x no longer fits in here. iOS 4 brought us GCD and blocks and the whole operating system is making heavy use of those. For example NSOperationQueue was rearchitected to use GCD under iOS 4 transparently. While this does not necessitate any code changes there are many other scenarios that would require separate code for iOS 3.x and 4.x/5.x.

Then there is the question of tools support. The Xcode versions that can support a 5.0 iPhone Simulator no longer support a 3.2 Simulator. The only useful way would be to keep some old device on 3.x to test on.

Conclusion and Apple Assistant

If the rumors are true then we will see the public launch of iCloud and iOS 5 round about the mid of October. Getting a GM build of iOS 5 one or two weeks before that (read: TODAY) is highly likely, especially sonce there was no BETA build for a month now.

There is another prospect that excites me besides all the great new iCloud features: Apple Assistant.

If Apple is putting something like this into iOS then most definitely we will also be getting an API for it. It is rumored that the iPhone 5 will have sufficient hardware specs to run the voice recognition on the device, but this might not be coming this year.

Most likely there will be a fall back mechanism for older devices to also be able to use Assistant: over iCloud. iPhone 4′s voice commands will be enhanced to do morre complex voice recognition on the iCloud servers, similar to how Google is doing it in Android. iPhone 5 will then be able to short cut the recognition on the phone hardware. But with a good 3G or WiFi connection you probably won’t notice the difference.

I imagine we just have to add a couple of new delegate methods into our apps to allow interaction with the Assistant API. The more such enabled apps you have the smarter your assistent will get. A large eco-system of Assistant-enabled apps right on your device might be the most fascinating prospect of iOS 5.

Get the snacks ready for an awesome iOS 5 launch party.