Apple has sneak previewed the next version of the iPhone OS yesterday. Besides the “huge innovation” of finally bringing Copy and Paste (btw “Shake to undo” is great) to the Phone, Apple has introduced some improvements that will enable third party developers to bring new innovation to the device. So what’s new and shiny in the iPhone SDK?
External Accessory framework: Talk to the iPhone
It is now possible to use an existing framework to connect your own hardware to the iPhone/iPod Touch. For example Lifescan showed an interesting prototype of a diabetes monitoring application. This application can talk to a glucose scanner seamlessly.
Peer-to-peer framework: Multi-player for the masses
The new peer-to-peer framework enables developers to easily connect to other iPod devices around you via bluetooth enabling a new quality of interactions between devices.
InApp purchasing: Please welcome new revenue models
It is now possible to purchase new levels, new content or even subscriptions from inside an iPhone App creating new opportunities for big and small business to create revenue from their applications.
No background services: Everybody needs to push
An interesting decision made by Apple is the fact that programs are not able to run background services on the iPhone. Instead developers need to use the Apple Push Service to send messages in order to wake sleeping apps. This push services keeps a constant connection to the device. According to Apple this decision was made in order to ensure battery life.
Additonal goodies
- Improved streaming for Video and Audio
- Location API
- Shake API
- …
The bottom line
The new release offers interesting additional functionalities. It’s good to see further innovation in the mobile market. For years and years we’ve seen the same crappy and closed software on the same lousy devices. Now Apple has raised the bar again and other platforms like Android and the new Palm webOS will continue to do so as well.