We just witnessed the iPhone 5 launch …almost live … at the Runtastic HQ where there was a Cocoahead special event. Let’s summarize what it means for us developers.
Tim Cook called iOS 6 and iPhone 5 the “biggest thing to happen to the iPhone since iCloud”.
iOS 6
- iOS 6 will be released to the general public on September 19th
- The new panorama mode in the Photo app sherlocks all the panorama stitching apps
- Passbook does not require any special Apple technology on the servers of the companies that vend passes. That makes it ideally suited for anything from movie to airplane tickets. I’m hoping that this pushes wide adoption soon and sherlocks all the special apps for carrying individual tickets.
- Safari now has a full screen mode and thus sherlocks all apps that are providing full screen browsing as their main (or only) feature.
- Support for the new higher screen is enabled by adding a taller launch image.
Here’s a panorama made with the new panorama feature. It’s Sherlocked! (my dog is named “Sherlock Holmes”)
iPhone 5
- iPhone 5 will have a taller screen, 4 inch with more pixels. 1136*640 pixels.
- Release date will be September 21st in the USA. 20 countries a week later, including Austria.
- if you don’t change anything in your apps then they will run “letterboxed”, with black bars at the top and bottom
- it will be “very easy” to update your app to support the new resolution (see above)
- The 5th Generation iPod touch will have an A5, touting 7 times performance of predecessor, clearly a play for the mobile console market, especially because it also supports AirPlay mirroring
- iPhone 3GS will no longer be sold with the iPhone 4 taking its spot as the “free” option. iPhone 4S will be the “cheap” option with contract.
- You can forget about using your LTE interchangably between USA and Europe. There are actually 3 models of the iPhone 5 with different frequencies.
- Also you need a new nano Sim card.
Other Stuff
- No new AppleTV or ability to develop apps for it or iPod Nano.
- No iPod touch “maxi” or iPad “mini”.
- The new earphones called “EarPods” look amazing, I’ll have to order a couple.
More details added as they become available.
Xcode 4.5 can no longer build for armv6, but instead it adds building for the new A6 CPU under the name “armv7s”. This means that if your apps use third party libraries you better include them as source code, preferably as sub-projects. Third party libraries (like Google Analytics) which only come in binary form cannot be used as these are missing armv7s and the Xcode linker is unable to find the armv7s symbols inside them for linking. In other words: you need to wait until the vendor gives you a static library/framework that includes armv7 and armv7s.
If you want to make a truly universal “fat” static library you have to separately build for i386, armv6 (with Xcode 4.4), armv7 and armv7s and then manually lipo these all together. Another reason why many developers will probably give in and simply retire support for armv6 (and thus iPhone 3G).
Categories: Apple
