The iPhone and iPad provide an unforgettable user experience. It’s one of the rare technologies that’s so intuitive that even a toddler can use it without a user manual. iOS provides a whole platform for developers. It comes with a huge global market and one integrated distribution place: the App Store. The iOS SDK offers a rich set of APIs for developers to turn their best ideas into killer applications. The new enhancements in iOS 4 allow developers to create applications faster and easier.
In this topic, we’ll first introduce iOS 4 and then go over the key specifications of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. We’ll cover the anatomy of iOS, including frameworks, windows, views, and methods. We’ll also cover events, memory management, and lifecycle management before providing tips on creating a successful application. Let’s start the story with the iOS platform.
The iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad (and likely future generations of Apple devices) all use iOS 4.3.1 (at the time of writing). The iOS moniker may be a bit confusing at first, but having one OS for all these devices makes it an easy and rewarding platform on which to develop. Learn how to develop for it once using the iOS SDK, and you can adapt your applications to whichever devices you like. For example, you can determine that the application will support only the devices with GPS or camera.
Let’s review a bit of history on iOS. The iOS SDK was first introduced in 2007 and released in March of 2008. The third major release, iOS 3.0, was released in 2009. Prior to iOS 4.2, there was a short, fragmented OS history on the iPhone and iPad; the iPhone was running on iOS 4.0 and the iPad was on iOS 3.2. With the new iOS, all the iOS-powered devices can once again run the same OS. For developers, the experience for application development is a lot smoother and easier. The most prominent feature on iOS 4 is that iOS supports multitasking services, including playing audio, push notifications, receiving location change events, and fast app switching. We’ll cover the details later in this topic.
The social experience is emphasized on iOS 4 with Game Center and iTunes 10 with Ping. Game Center allows developers to create social game experiences with the Game Kit framework. For end users, it’s amazing to start multiplayer games through automatching, tracking their achievements, and so on.
There are differences in developing applications for the iPad as opposed to the iPhone, but they’re primarily related to the varying amount of real estate available to each device, as illustrated in figure 1.1. Obviously, the iPad has a much bigger screen for display or interaction. The content focus is to provide a rich information presentation. In the UI design, you may want to distinguish the iPad from the iPhone. For the most part, you can run the examples in this topic on either the iPad or the iPhone with little adaptation. (iPhone applications are fully compatible on the iPad as is; universal applications support different experiences depending on the platform they’re being run on.)
One more thing: iOS 4.3 allows applications to support printing through Airprint. Imagine that you can edit your photo with the iPad or iPhone and tap the Print button to get the photo printed out on your wi-fi printer! We’ll cover this function in detail later in topic 11.
