Most of the news leaving the hallowed halls of the Moscone West building in San Francisco, where Apple’s Developer Conference - WWDC 2011 - is taking place, centres around the announcement of iOS 5 and its fluffy new features and services such as iCloud, iMessage, Newsstand, and Reminders. Surprisingly, very little has been reported on the major technical improvements in iOS 5 from a developer perspective. And iOS 5 has a lot of big improvements for developers.
Here are the features that I truly believe will make a major improvement to a developer’s life:
1. Notification Center
One of the main complaints over iOS in the last six months has been the inflation of push notifications that disturb the user experience with an iPhone or iPad. Notification Center in iOS 5 builds on the existing notification system with provisioning now built right into Xcode, making it easier to implement.
With the new Notification Center in iOS 5 you can display and manage notifications without interrupting the user. The user can see all notifications in a single place via the Notification Center from the home screen or from any app by swiping down the status bar. When the user gets a new notification it will briefly appear at the top of the screen instead of a popup. The lock screen also displays the notifications so you can respond to them quickly with just a swipe.
To read more about the Notification Center visit here.
2. Automatic Reference Counting (ARC)
I might be going out on a limb here, but in my opinion the ARC is what is normally referred to as garbage collector. One of the key complaints by Android developers, particularly when developing for iOS, is the difficult of memory management in iOS. This also affects users since apps constantly crash. With ARC though, the developer no longer needs to be an expert in memory management as the compiler does the job for you. In theory this should allow apps to run faster and more reliably. Whether it will make apps more stable in general or cause developers to become sloppy remains to be seen.
3. Twitter integration
To be fair this has been one of the main features discussed in the media. But I believe this is more due to the fact that the media loves Twitter. What they don’t say though is that Android has supported Twitter and other social networking integration for over a year, as Android allows apps to interact with each other. Nevertheless, iOS now provides the key features of Twitter as well. The deep integration allows the association of a Twitter account within iOS settings. So now the integration with an app does not have to be done by the user by logging in and or adding an account manually. Since most apps nowadays provide sharing through Twitter, this will enhance the user’s experience enormously.
To be fair this has been one of the main features discussed in the media. But I believe this is more due to the fact that the media loves Twitter. What they don’t say though is that Android has supported Twitter and other social networking integration for over a year, as Android allows apps to interact with each other. Nevertheless, iOS now provides the key features of Twitter as well. The deep integration allows the association of a Twitter account within iOS settings. So now the integration with an app does not have to be done by the user by logging in and or adding an account manually. Since most apps nowadays provide sharing through Twitter, this will enhance the user’s experience enormously.
4. Core Image
During the last year some of the coolest and most popular apps have been photo editing or photo filtering apps such as Instagram, Hipstamatic, Camerabag, Photogene and many more. Core Image provides a framework for editing images and videos, making it a lot easier to implement these features into any app. In addition to this, the framework is tightly integrated with the hardware to make performance even better.
5. OpenGL ES
The new OpenGL capabilities are what really excite game developers and 3D animators.
With the GL Kit in iOS 5 the capabilities for advanced rendering and texture techniques have become even better, and we are yet to see how those capabilities can be utilised.
6. PC Free
The sixth and last feature I want to highlight has little to do with the developer SDK but may turn out to become one of the biggest advantages. Today the majority of users upgrade to the latest iOS within the first couple of months. Some though, will still stick to an older version and cause headaches for developers in terms of backwards interoperability support. Hopefully PC Free will be so tempting a feature that only a small share of users will remain with older versions of the OS. Unfortunately, however, Apple also announced that the oldest iPhones cannot be upgraded to iOS 5 so some legacy issues will still remain.
So there you have a CEO’s perspective on iOS 5. Let’s start making use of it when it’s launched (hopefully) in September.
Golden Gekko is attending WWDC but it seems, playing with the SDK and Apple’s other new toys has kept them too busy to give us a full report yet.
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