Comments on: iPhone SDK

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:46:11 +0000

While the lack of background app support is indeed somewhat annoying (and prevents many types of mobile apps from being practical), the recent Stevenote has demonstrated that an AIM-type application doesn’t particularly need to be running in the background.

The solution is to move all management to the server-side, and use the push notification system to re-launch the app when something of note happens. For example, you run the app to log in and view your contact list. Presumably, the most recent state of the app can be saved. Re-launching the app would only require a quick update from the server to update the most recent known state of your contact list and conversations. Any activity, such as new messages, can be received by the server and pushed out to the iPhone even though the app is not running. The app can then be re-launched, using the previously stored state and updating with the latest info. To the user, the experience should be remarkably similar to a true background app.

Of course, this is all a huge kludge. A lot of extra work needs to be put in to handle all this state and session management, and now you need to invest significant additional server-side resources for your app.

By: Kevin Ballard

Kevin Ballard — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 03:27:38 +0000

Ken: By paying $299 (instead of the usual $99) you’ll be able to deploy apps enterprise-wide instead of globally.

By: Stefus

Stefus — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:39:36 +0000

Ken: Apple to create enterprise AppStore for internal deployment

By: Jonas Kvinge

Jonas Kvinge — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:39:06 +0000

Hi, I’ve been reading some of your blog posts and was wondering if you’d like to try reverse engineer the new iPods so that there is possible to make it run with rockbox. I got an iPod Classic for christmas and I have no way of playing my music collection of over 900 cd’s ripped to flac on the iPod.

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=14086.0

By: Ken Sykora

Ken Sykora — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:52:38 +0000

The only thing that really bothers me about the SDK is that there’s not an official way to deploy an application to the phone without using the Application Store. What if I want to write an enterprise application to be used by those in my company but I don’t want to make it publicly available through the Application Store?