Are you a budding author who needs help? Apple has just given you a way to get your masterpiece into the iBooks store for the iPad (and soon for iPhone with OS 4.0), and the best thing is you can do it all yourself without ever knocking the doors of an publisher, distributor, agent or anything else for that matter. You, as an author can decide how much to charge and which countries to sell into. You get the same deal as the iPhone/iPad app publishers( meaning that Apple takes 30% and you keep 70% of the revenue).
There are some requirements before you can successfully publish your book on the iBookStore:
iPhone OS 4 is the next generation of the world’s most innovative mobile operating system. Its unique capabilities and new technologies will change what you thought was possible on a mobile platform. With a rich set of over 1500 new APIs, iPhone SDK for iPhone OS 4 provides you with an amazing range of technologies to enhance the functionality of your iPhone and iPod touch apps. iPhone Developer Program members can visit the iPhone Dev Center to download the iPhone SDK 4 beta now.
iPhone OS 4 delivers seven new multitasking services that allow your apps to perform tasks in the background while preserving battery life and performance. These multitasking services include:
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Apple has released iPad, its new tablet computer, which is the size of a standard children’s slate and does not have a keyboard or mouse, but relies on a touch-screen.
Apple iPad
Steve Jobs claims it will offer the best browsing experience you can have, like “holding the Internet in your hands.” The iPad appears to be answer to netbooks, but combines the best of all iPhone and earlier Apple products. Read the rest of this entry »
Today while I was working with some CoreGraphics API’s, I encountered a error which I was seeing it for the first time. CG for dumping an error “CGGStackRestore: gstack underflow” in the console everytime I invoked a method that was doing some CG based operations. Googling around I found that in CoreGraphics, you can save (CGContextSaveGState) and restore (CGContextRestoreGState) the graphics state. When the state is saved, a copy is put on the graphics state’s “stack”, and when it is restored, the top state on the stack is removed and used. If we restore the state more times than we save it and then when we try to remove and use the top item of the stack, the stack is empty, causing a stack “underflow” error. So just make sure you have enough save-restore state methods called and it will fix the issue.
CGGStackRestore
With Flash Professional CS5, we can now build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store. A public beta of Flash Professional CS5 with prerelease support for building applications for iPhone is planned for later this year. At MAX 2009, Adobe showed a number of applications and games for iPhone that have been built using a prerelease version of Flash Professional CS5. The tooling update allows developers to use Flash technologies to develop content for iPhone and iPod touch. Developers can write new code or reuse existing web content to build applications for iPhone. Because the source code and assets are reusable across the Flash Platform runtimes,—Adobe AIR and Flash Player—it also gives developers a way to more easily target other mobile and desktop environments.
I learned the hard way that disconnecting my iPod Nano while it was still connect to Mac would freeze it. If you ever face a frozen iPod Nano, you need to toggle the ‘hold’ switch on and off to ‘lock’ then ‘unlock’ the iPod controls, then press the ‘Menu’ and ‘Select’ (centre) buttons for about 10 seconds until the Apple logo appears and your iPod Nano restarts.
Safari supports audio and video viewing in a webpage on the desktop and iPhone OS. You can use audio and video HTML elements or use the embed element to use the native application for video playback. In either case, you need to ensure that the video you create is optimized for the platform and different bandwidths.
audio
video
embed
iPhone OS streams movies and audio using HTTP over EDGE, 3G, and Wi-Fi networks. iPhone OS uses a native application to play back video even when video is embedded in your webpages. Video automatically expands to the size of the screen and rotates when the user changes orientation. The controls automatically hide when they are not in use and appear when the user taps the screen. This is the experience the user expects when viewing all video on iPhone OS.
MISC Directory
After moving to iPhone OS 3.0, from past few days i have been experiencing a strange bug. The camera photos, images saved from the web, or iPhone screenshots are not showing up in the Camera Roll. The iPhone’s Camera Roll keeps a correct cumulative count, and I have no problem transferring the images files to my MacBook using iPhoto or Picasa. Read the rest of this entry »
iPhone 3GS Battery Meter
iPhone 3GS now supports showing the battery charge level as a percentage rather than just the icon indicator. Percentage indicator is really helpful. Most of the times I plug the charger to my macbook when it starts showing the battery level at less than 3%. And with iPhone I usually end up plugging the charger only when it shuts down completely running out of battery. The 10% battery remaining warning is too early.
Unfortunately Apple has put this new option only in new iPhone 3GS. Its not available for iPhone 3G or the 1st gen iPhone. Apple is so cruel.
I wonder what big pain would it cause to Apple to include that feature in all iPhone models. Apple acts crazy.
SSL is a big part of building secure web services. The steps outlined below can help generate a certificate for Adobe AIR applications to be signed.
Quick note: This is a fairly detailed process, so take a firm hold of the wheel and be prepared for a lengthy ride. You are going to need your terminal and su access. You will be generating encryption keys and certificates, and editing Apache conf files. First, you need a certificate
Step 1
Open up a terminal window, and su root. Then, cd over to your Documents directory.
Add a new directory in there using mkdir and call it certs like so:
sh-3.2# mkdir certs
Then cd into it.
Type this command…
sh-3.2# /System/Library/OpenSSL/misc/CA.pl -newca
You’ll see a whole pile of stuff fly by, piece by piece:
CA certificate filename (or enter to create) (hit enter)
Making CA certificate ...
Generating a 1024 bit RSA private key
......++++++
...........++++++
writing new private key to './demoCA/private/cakey.pem'
Enter PEM pass phrase: [enter a passphrase]
Verifying - Enter PEM pass phrase: [enter the passphrase again]
-----
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter ‘.’, the field will be left blank. —–
I found this web based iPhone mockup creator. Nice tool. Supports sharing the design creation with multiple users and collabrate on the mockup….
The all new iPhone 3GS has arrived. ‘S’ standing for speed. The internal hardware has undergone lots of changes while still retaining the same good old look externally. The new iPhone 3GS supposedly loads 2.1x faster to launch Messages, 2.4x to load SimCity, 3.6x faster to load an Excel attachment, 2.9x faster to load a large website.
Messed Up Icons With iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 5
With the latest release of iPhone OS 3.0 seed 5, the icons of the applications are being messed up. This mostly occurs when we install updates to the applications from App store. Few applications will not have any icons altogether, few apps have icons of their neighbouring apps like shown in the figure. iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5 is lot more buggier than beta 4 or beta 3. Also I have observed beta 5 drains the battery very fast. My iPhone lost more than half of its power over night even without performing any tasks while lying idle. Seems Apple has purposefully made beta 5 buggy so that users are forced to move to the final version expected in the WWDC.
On the screenshot we can observe that, PingPongLite application doesnt have icon at all and NewsPro and Bloomberg have same icons.
However on a positive note, if we restart the iPhone, all icons are restored to their original application icons.
Apple barely scratched the surface on all of the new features in store for the iPhone OS 3.0. Apple apparently decided to save a few pleasant surprises for the official release of iPhone OS 3.0. Two biggies are: video recording and Internet tethering functionalities.
Internet tethering allows the user to share their cellular data network to their desktop machines over bluetooth or USB.
iPhone Internet Tethering Settings
Internet Tethering
In addition, subscribers to Apple’s MobileMe suite of cloud services will be able to locate stolen a device geographically using the web interface.
There you go — Apple has just announced that its Worldwide Developer Conference 2009 will take place from June 8th through June 12th in sunny San Fransico. Apple has a few surprises up its collective sleeve. So what do you guys think? Netbook? Snow Leopard? Tablet? More than one new iPhone model? Hit the comments section and be heard.
WWDC 2009
