Apple has released iPhone 3.1 Beta 3 (7C116a) to developers via developer.apple.com, along with notification that iPhone 3.1 Beta 2 expires tomorrow, July 28 at 12am (device local time).

While Apple has previously released most of the betas on Tuesday, a desire to prevent the “pink screen of death” associate with expired betas perhaps necessitated an earlier release this time.

The OS weighs is said to weigh in at around 307MB. Updates to follow below as we get them:

According to WhenWillApple, you can now copy and paste videos into email (like you could images under 3.0) to get full resolution (not compressed like the share option). We’re guessing email box size will still be a restriction…

Also, Tethering Data now gets it’s own counter in Settings > General > Usage.

[Thanks to Davizzle for the tip!]

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Updated: Apple Release iPhone 3.1 Beta 3 to Developers (Beta 2 Expiring Tues, July 28!)

I was just listening to Dieter and Mike’s latest PalmCast, where they were crowing in duet about how sweet it was that the Palm Pre has an app that can book movie tickets and automagically add the movie event information to the Palm Pre calendar.

I know, I know. If they love the Palm Pre so much, why don’t they just marry it? (Dieter is, in fact, looking for a state that may allow it…) But they raise an excellent point — where’s the iPhone version of that functionality? Why can’t we push a button on our movie ticket app, or concert tour app, or tradeshow app, or whatever and have that slice of time booked off for us in our calendar?

While the iPhone SDK allows access to the Contacts database to do all manner of glorious, 3rd party app-powered magic, Apple has thus far not surfaced any APIs to do the same for calendaring. I don’t believe the new 3.0 SDK has announced any improvements in that area either.

What makes calendar so different? MobileMe and ActiveSync push both. Apple’s even giving Calendar some much-appreciated CalDAV and subscription love, with no CardDAV that we’re aware of for contacts.

We’re sure developers would appreciate it. We know users would adore it.

Anyone have any idea why we don’t have this yet?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Dear Apple: Why Can’t Apps Access the Calendar?

UPDATED: According to the screenshot we just received, looks like Apple has, for the first time, re-jiggered the order of Apps on the Home Screen (previously they just added iTunes and then App Store). Now Voice Memo takes Clocks spot, Notes switches with Calculator, Clock goes where Notes was, and Calculator bumps Settings to the bottom row along with iTunes and App Store, which move left a slot to make room. Not sure about this new arrangement, what do you think?

Also, there’s apparently a new Settings panel for Store, although it sounds like it’s blank right now.

ORIGINAL: Sneaking in just before the end of March, Apple has released iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 2, both SDK and firmware to developers. If you’re spinning apps for this summer’s big release, head on over to developer.apple.com and get your download on.

TiPB has already done a fairly extensive iPhone 3.0 walkthrough of the front-facing elements of Beta 1, but we’ll have to wait for the usual deep-code divers out on the internet to let us know if there’s anything new surfaced in Beta 2.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

UPDATED: iPhone 3.0 Beta 2 Now Available for Developers

As part of their just concluded iPhone OS 3.0 Preview Event, Apple refreshed the iPhone SDK and announced over 1000 new API for developers which, according to Senior Vice President of iPhone Software, Scott Forstall, are designed to better help developers make great apps. (And a boatload of money for all involved, ‘natch).

Highlights include:

• In-app purchases, which means if you’re play a First Person Shoot, you can pay $0.99 (or whatever they choose) to get yourself a better gun.)
• Peer-to-Peer connectivity, which should allow multi-user, or multi-player interaction for games or information exchange using Bonjour and Bluetooth (no pairing needed).
• Push Notification Service, which was first announced at WWDC last year, will finally make an appearance and allow developers, through Apple’s server, to trigger badges (like Mail’s unread message counter), custom sounds, and modal alerts (like the new SMS message box).
• Maps lets developers embed Google Maps functionality in their own applications with full interactions, but also custom annotations.
• Accessory support means developers can now interact with “made for iPod” certified accessories either via Dock port or Bluetooth — no word yet on Bluetooth keyboards, however.
• iPod Library access — which we’re sure Steve Jobs wrestled from Big Music’s petrified hands — let’s developers access onboard audio content, so users can listen to their own stuff, in 3rd party apps.

There’s a lot more to it, of course, especially at the deeper and more fundamental levels it looks like. Hopefully if Apple can get the App Store sorted out in similar fashion, iPhone Apps could be steamrolling into the second generation!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone OS 3.0 SDK Beta: 1000 New APIs! Maps! iPod! P2P! iPod Access! Dock Access! More!

Today Apple dropped new Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro desktops, and Airport Extreme, and Time Capsule routers. Previously, we’d heard rumors about Apple waiting and holding one of their Special Events on March 24th, a “Spotlight Turns to Desktops” to bookend last fall’s “Spotlight Turns to Laptops” event. But none of today’s releases were as new or event-worthy as the unibody MacBooks announced last year, were they?

So, if Apple really is having a March 24th event — and it’s not just some interfanboynet make believe — what’s left for them to announce?

Well, March 2008 was the iPhone SDK Roadmap Event, where Apple began the process that ultimately led us to iPhone OS 2.0 and the App Store.

Could March 2009 give us a similar peek into the beginning of a beta process for iPhone OS 3.0? Could it show off an App Store-level complication on the order of an iPhone HD or iTablet, requiring the months before WWDC and an eventual summer release be spent testing new resolutions or screen sizes, or other hardware changes bound for the iPhone 2,1 model?

As stated explicitly in the title, pure and abject speculation at this point, but Apple does seem to like product cycles and symmetry…

What do you think?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Speculation Alert: Does This Mean March 24 Will be iPhone 3.0 Beta? iTablet? What?!

There seems to be some confusion out there about the iPhone and multitasking, no doubt fueled by the way Apple handled — and is still handling — all things iPhone. Just to be clear, the iPhone multitasks quite well, thank you very much.

While listening to music, you can receive a phone call, take the call, jump into Safari, Google for an image, save the image to your camera roll, jump into Photos, choose the image, hit the “+” and choose to email the image, fill in and send the email, etc. and when the call is over, your music will fade seamlessly back in.

Steve Jobs showed a simpler version of that when he first introduced the iPhone back at Macworld 2007. Even today, you can begin a new iTunes 3G music download, jump into a Twitter app, tweet a response, and jump back to iTunes and see your download still progressing.

So from where does this confusion come?

Apple only allows their own built-in apps like Email, Phone, etc. to multitask (Daring Fireball posted a nice list on which ones a while back). In the current SDK (Software Development Kit — what people use to write iPhone App Store programs), the licensing prohibits everyone else from multi-tasking. So, no 3rd party IM, Twitter, internet radio, etc. applications can stay on once the user hits the home button.

Apple’s Push Notification Service was supposed to work around this by sending status alerts (badges like unread message counter on Email, pop-ups, or alarms like Calendar events) from Apple’s servers, but while this was promised for September ‘08, it was yanked from iPhone OS 2.1 Beta 4 and hasn’t been heard from since. Rumor has it Apple is afraid — for good reason — of repeating it’s near-disastrous MobileMe launch, and would rather delay it than get it wrong. Developers we’ve spoken to agree – no one wants to handle customer support calls based on a buggy PNS implementation.

Selfishly, we kind of hope Apple doesn’t manage to nail PNS in a timely fashion and is instead forced to open up real multitasking, even if only on a limited basis (i.e. more rigorous approval process). (We’d even like to see a CoverFlow task-switcher while they’re at it.)

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb SMASH: the iPhone and Multitasking Misconceptions

A week or so ago we linked to Erica Sadun’s demo of the iPhone SDK’s undocumented video out feature. Well, she’s been busy since then talking with Freeverse, the developers behind the hit Moto Chaser game for the iPhone. The result? The tech demo featured above.

Good news is that the possibilities are mind-boggling. Bad news is that we’re not there yet:

On the 2G touch, Moto Chaser can reach approximately 20 frames per second. This makes the game, in the words of Freeverse Producer Bruce Morrison, “nearly playable.” Morrison manages the Freeverse product teams and was heavily involved in developing Moto Chaser; he designed all the levels in the game. The norm for commercial games is 30fps, a point at which motion becomes as smooth and watchable as normal TV video. For reference, the current iPhone release of Moto Chaser runs at 26fps and includes many optimizations to achieve even that on the iPhone’s relatively slow processor and limited RAM memory.

Check out the rest of the article for look into how they did it, how long it took, and where they might go from here…

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Play Moto Chaser for iPhone… on Your TV?!

UPDATE: iPhone dev extraordinaire Erica Sadun investigated over at Ars and found the following: Google is both linking to Private Frameworks and using unpublished APIs. While the latter is likened to jaywalking, the former is apparently a ban-worthy offense. Yikes. Check out her complete investigation for more. And now that it’s public, the question shifts to what if anything Apple will do about it? Cave to Google over a killer feature and betray the confidence of other developers, or yank Google’s app, alienating a huge (if guilty) partner and likely creating another furor among users?

Original post:

Is Google using private (i.e., not publicly available via the official iPhone SDK) APIs to create the silky-smooth “raise the phone and talk” activation for their new Advanced Voice Search feature in the update Google Mobile App? That’s the latest question Daring Fireball’s been looking into, and here’s what they’ve found so far:

If you use something like the command-line strings utility to examine the UIKit framework, you can see that there’s an undocumented (and therefore private to Apple) method named proximityStateChanged. And if one were to strip the FairPlay DRM from the current Google Mobile application binary — which, of course, you wouldn’t do, because you’re not supposed to strip FairPlay DRM, but I’m just saying if one were to do this — a class dump of the application binary would show that Google Mobile does in fact implement proximityStateChanged.

DF posits three possible explinations: 1) No one at Apple noticed the private API usage, 2) Apple noticed but turned a blind-eye, or 3) Apple approved the use of a private API. Citing sources, DF claims #3 to not be the case, and perhaps that’s why Google promoted the feature so heavily, and stirred up interest so high Apple would feel pressure to approve it (though we wonder if Steve Jobs’ Apple ever feels that type of pressure?)

By contrast, DF states #1 is not without precedence, while #2 would be grossly unfair to other developers, and either way, users may suffer if Apple makes changes to their private APIs (which is one of the reasons to keep them private after all).

So what do you think? Which scenario is most likely? And what would you rather, that developers (Google or not) use officially unsupported features if it means better apps but also apps that might just break when the next firmware drops?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

UPDATED! Google Using Private API’s For Advanced Voice Search?

iPhone developer extraordinaire Erica Sadun over at Ars reveals that Apple has expanded on the iPhone SDK samples, and with some pretty nifty new stuff.

While I can’t claim to understand it, included in the update is aurioTouch and oalTouch for scilloscope and positional audio, Accessory and TouchCells which (apparently!) give greater options in tables and cells, and URLCache and Reflection which focus on Web-based data and image reflections respectively.

Says Sadun:

The iPhone Reference Library is an amazing resource for developers. It offers access to sample code, guides, and release notes. The new items I listed here augment Apple’s already rich iPhone sample code suite. Make a habit of stopping by the library page; Apple will often add new items there without announcement.

Check it out!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Apple Adds New Samples to iPhone SDK

‘Tis soon the season. No, not fall, but new firmware season as Apple has released the first beta for firmware 2.2. Following on the 8 betas for 2.0 (released July 11, which turned out a little on the undercooked side…), and 4 for 2.1 (released September 12, which changed from feature bump to stability patch), 2.2 will hopefully bring us a little Notification Server love, and who knows what else? (Not going to say cut and paste — a blogger can only get their heart broken so often!). Says Macrumors:

The new version is labeled iPhone OS 2.2 beta 1 and is accompanied by a new beta of the iPhone SDK (build 9M2611). Beyond “compatibility testing”, there are no other differences noted by Apple.

Doubtless, the one NDA to [redact] them all is in full effect, but hopefully some deep-delving coders will discover (and leak!) a few goodies for us anyway.

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iPhone 2.2 Firmware Beta 1 Seeded to Select Developers