Friday, June 10th, 2011
Jim Underwood, Chief Architect
I should correct something from my earlier post. I said sandboxing had come to iOS.
Some of you probably noticed that the subject of the sentence was Lion. And that is indeed the case – Lion has landed squarely in the sandbox.
Apple is dead serious about this business of protecting you from unruly or compromised apps. Beginning in November, if you want to distribute Mac apps on the App Store, they must be “sandboxed” and Apple has brought the concepts from iOS to OSX land.
This has undoubtedly done a lot to fuel the rampant speculation that OSX is soon for the scrap heap to be replaced by virtually weightless MacBooks with the A5 processor and a flash drive. Hmmm, sounds a lot like a …. Well the gent that did the presentation on the sandboxing technology did a great job advancing the vision and I came away impressed if still a bit skeptical.
Anyway, Apple would like you to break your big old monolithic app up into bits that (1) interface with the web, (2) process data locally and (3) read or write data from files outside the app’s “container”. To do that they announced a new set of technologies that “just work” of course but sound a lot like COM to me. Yikes. Well we’ll have to wait and see. A good thing we are not on the App Store with OM for Mac.
But a good sandboxing might make for a strong customer story, e.g. “iPass enthusiastically embraces Apple drive for App security”, etc. Sign me up. Still, I noticed that Apple had done a middle of the road compromise in the “entitlement” approach to security that certainly makes it easier for developers to characterize their apps but remains a simplified, and therefore less specific technology than the more fine-grained Android privilege profile approach.
But middle of the road may be good enough – I read that iOS +AppStore is now widely regarded as the most secure OS/App integrity technology on the planet. And that ladies and gentlemen is not just from the Steve’s mouth.
More on sandboxing at WWDC >>
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
Jim Underwood, Chief Architect
Here are some pictures to go with yesterday’s blog posts.
iPass engineer being interviewed:
Inside the WWDC:
The LINE outside WWDC:
Enjoying Mel’s Diner before we missed the start of the keynote:
Pictures from WWDC >>
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
Jim Underwood, Chief Architect
via AP
A couple of additional items on the new “steveCloud.”
The Apple vision is that if your iPhone dies or your iPad is stolen, no problem. After a suitable donation, you can simply register the new one (over the air of course) and it will be cloned to look just like your old one just prior to its demise.
The magic is in the completeness of the iCloud integration with the major app species on the devices, leaving almost nothing uncovered by that warm blanket.
Another thing I forgot – non-Apple apps can play too! An iCloud API is now available which covers storage of documents and small sets of key/value pairs in the cloud. The idea being is that you wrap anything your app creates in the Document class and save any configuration parameters in key/value pairs and *bam!* – your app can restore itself too.
More on iCloud integration at WWDC >>
Tuesday, June 7th, 2011
Jim Underwood, Chief Architect
Well all was not lost – the rest of the day was much geekier.
We got a really great Kickoff keynote on the Core OS evolution in Lion (I am growing tired and you are probably not interested in these details except that Sandboxing has come to iOS land). Starting in November, all apps must be sandboxed to increase the collective security of the platform attacks from virulent ads, etc.
There is a whole new level of entitlement primitives being asserted which will really narrow the accessibility of the general file system and other services to just those needed by the app. Of course they recognize that all of the apps out there were written prior to November so they will, for a limited time only, allow certain “indulgences” in exchange for your first born app – not really, but you must carefully explain why you need the indulgence and commit to a date of compliance.
Cocoa and Cocoa Touch have gotten a MAJOR new feature which will greatly streamline internationalization – AutoLayout. This allow the runtime to dynamically resize all the aspects of the UI to accommodate changes in size of text content and window sizing, even dynamically moving left-justified text to right-justified for right-to-left languages.
The Developer Tools keynote was similarly engaging. Two new versions of XCODE (that is Apple’s Visual Studio) bring near parity with Visual Studio in respect to the use of a single-window work space. They have added this cool new feature that allows you to tell XCODE what windows and tools you want visible when you perform specific tasks. As a part of the AutoLayout feature support, the Interface Builder now allows you describe relative constraints among the several elements of a View which dynamically determines the appearance and limits of window resizing, etc. Very cool.
The Unit Test Tool allows you download defined datasets to the device under test prior to running the test. But that is only if you unit test. There are several new features which support game development although some of it may be of value in UI prototyping – Story Board Editor. It allows you to define Scenes and Segues between them. You can easily attach navigation controllers (toolbars) and exercise the thing very simply. The real jackpot is the new Open GL Performance Detective, Analyzer and DEBUGGER. Yes, an actual debugger for drawing sequences.
And the last bit that is – LLVM version 3 – Apple’s replacement for GCC (the GNU C compiler) will now fully support C++ and it is getting rid of the need for manual memory management in Objective C – not by implementing garbage collection but by static analysis and your own sleuthing abilities. They are including a smart tool to convert your existing code with NSAutoreleasePools into sparking clean code with compiler-generated allocation and deallocation of objects and with a sprinkling of “weak” references which the programmer must discover using the Instrument (profiling) tool and denote to overcome those stubborn “retain cycles”.
All of that has resulted in a much improved performance for memory management and without the non-deterministic performance of garbage collection. (Are you still reading???). All this joy is soon to be available – version 4.1 will support Lion and 4.2 shortly later will support iOS 5 too.
Now far away from the patter of 5,200 geek feet, this was how June 6th looked to your erstwhile correspondent. More tomorrow, I hope.
More on Day 1 at WWDC >>
Tuesday, June 7th, 2011
Jim Underwood, Chief Architect
Via latimes.com
Arriving at 7:40 am, “Registration” had opened at 7:00 and the lines inside were meager. The other 5000 attendees (hereafter “the BADGED”) were being herded completely around the building. When Puru and I completed our loop of the block and found our place in line, we could see those, some of whom, I kid you not, had been in line since 2AM. These Applets are tenacious creatures.
Instead we took up residence barely a block away at Mel’s Diner where we ate often and drank a full pot of coffee before we emerged at about 9:50, reasoning that most everyone MUST be inside by now – the keynote was, after all, beginning in just 10 minutes.
Wrong. We finally took our seats inside about 10:15 but they had gone ahead and started the keynote anyway so I can’t tell you anything about the first seven of Lion’s cool new features.
And, the story was all about Lion (the next release of OSX- and ONLY 29.99 at your friendly app store. No more CDs), iOS 5 and, of course, the anxiously awaited iCloud. Lion will be available imminently (an undefined future time before November).
Quite a few new app features in Lion:
- A platform level version management system that has been fully leveraged in all the media creation and document authoring apps – in typical Apple style (It just works – Steve said)
- AirDrop (Peer-to-Peer networking but with consent to send built into the receiver experience) and several very cool new features in Mail (yes mail can be cool), including an incredible thread segmentation and display feature that was actually quite impressive.
- Sorry, those are numbers 8, 9, 10. To get the first seven, I would have either had to come down at 2AM and I draw the line there.
One big bit of news – 2500 new developer APIs – I’m sure there’s a few of interest to most developers.
Statistics on iOS
We got a lot of statistics – almost 10 minutes worth – on iOS:
- There are now more than 200 million iOS devices in the world, 25 million of which are iPads which have consumed 15 billion songs, 130 million books and 14 billion app downloads.
- There are now 425,000 apps on the app store (I’m sure I read an announcement about a week ago about there being more than 500,000 but perhaps they threw 75000 away – and good riddance!).
- Of those 90,000 are iPad apps, there are 225 million iTunes accounts with active PayPal or credit card payment information at the ready for that next tune download.
- Apple, the good guys that they are, have paid developers $2.5 billion. Based on their cut of 30% (is that right?) that means Apple has cleared a cool $1.2 billion – not bad.
- the iOs camera is about to become the most popular camera in the world – just ask Steve
iOS 5 got 1,500 new APIs. A big theme this year is Apple’s commitment to force convergence of all of the core functionality on OS X and iOS with differentiation only at the presentation layers of the architecture, where they are appropriate. In this case, I got all 10 of the coolest new features in iOS 5:
1. Notifications are now full fledged managed objects (that’s #1 ???)
2. Newsstand for magazine subscriptions
3. Twitter is now a full fledged integrated service in iOS complete with its own APIs (go figure),
4. Safari had a very cool new feature called Reader – it dynamically extracts news stories from all the crap sourrounding them (that’s my new word), even from multiple pages, constructing a condensed, easily readable version and even saving to a “Reading List” if if you want for offline perusal – very sweet.
5. Reminders got a kick – you know how boring and annoying they are – now you can set reminders that include a GEOFENCE so they don’t remind you until you exit a geozone. Cool but I have enough reminders as it is.
6. Camera got some major work including new AE/AF touch point lock – very cool
7. Mail got a new integrated dictionary with pop-up definitions and a new control on its keyboard that allows you to convert the keyboard into a split keyboard – convenient for thumb typists.
8. iOS is now PC-free – no more plug-in-to-iTunes junk. No sire, you can activate it right there over what have you. Software updates are now entirely over the air – no return to the mother MAC.
9. Game center – more statistics – 9 months – 50 million subscribers a compared to Xbox Live’s 30 million. Steve is winning.
10. A new feature “iMessage” which fully integrates text, photo, group addressing – everything your little apple core every wanted.
So I almost lost one in the thrall of iOS ecstasy when I found out that the iOS 5 SDK was available on CD immediately and will appear on an iPad 6 in November (model numbering just a wild guess).
Of course, the big thing was the much heralded and anxiously awaited ICLOUD! Steve came out for this. Yes, Steve is taking over responsibility for automatically guaranteeing that much of your app data, documents, iBooks, iApps, photos, calendars, etc. etc. is stored in the cloud and automagically replicated to all of your devices.
Just what I always wanted is Steve proving that I should have gotten the 32GB iPhone. Just kidding – they are doing this quite thoughtfully. Only your last 1000 pictures you take will be replicated to your iPhone or iPad into your new “PhotoStream”. And for your music that you ripped from CDs, Steve is going to be really nice and send his own copies of those songs to the replicants all without charging you for each song – all you have to do is give him $24.99/yr to keep up to 10 devices synched. Not bad. Amazon’s cloud service costs $50 and Google is still deciding. (That last bit was straight from the Steve himself).
Stay tuned for more from Monday
Day 1 at Apple Worldwide Developer Conference – Keynote >>
