Andy Ihnatko on the iPhone Event

post from Daring Fireball on 06 March 2008 06:50:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Andy Ihnatko:

Note how carefully this event is being orchestrated. Apple has carefully lined up a series of white porcelain plates at the far end of a shooting gallery. Each one is labeled with a known percentage of the marketplace that ?can?t? buy an iPhone for specific technical reasons. Annnd? plink! plink! plink!? they?re knocking them all down.

Best summary of today’s event I’ve seen.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://ihnatko.com/index.php/2008/03/06/apples-special-iphone-press-eventmy-liveb
log/

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"The Church Of Mac" Takes Love Of Apple To
Religious Level

post from prMac on 06 March 2008 06:05:42 PM. © prMac

Ex-Apple Employee Becomes Pseudo-Church Leader; spoofs TV evangelists and technology. Former "Mac Genius" Tony Edwards has taken the sometimes fanatical love of the Apple Inc. to it's logical conclusion by creating "The Church of Mac". Edwards portrays the fictional character, "The Reverend Doctor Bobby Newton", whom he describes as "a mash-up of Stephen Colbert, Dr. Michael Beckwith (of Oprah fame) and The Onion."

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-1599.htm

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Apple posts SDK stream

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 06 March 2008 05:45:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Apple has posted the event stream for the iPhone software developer's kit session that took place at...

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http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/03/06/apple.posts.sdk.stream/

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Moto Marketing Exec Quits

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 06 March 2008 04:35:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

The chief marketing executive at Motorola has made a sudden departure, the Wall Street Journal has r...

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http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/03/06/moto.marketing.exec.quits/

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iPhone Enterprise Beta

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 06 March 2008 04:30:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Apple today launched its iPhone Enterprise Beta Program, a new mini-site dedicated to bringing the i...

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http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/03/06/iphone.enterprise.beta/

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iPhone Enterprise and SDK: First Impressions and
Questions

post from Daring Fireball on 06 March 2008 04:11:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Enterprise Support

Back in June, I didn’t think this would happen. I was wrong. There was never any question that this is a big market, the question is whether Apple wanted a part of it. The answer, clearly, is yes. The enterprise features announced today are serious and difficult.

The Developer Tools

The tools look awesome — far better and more advanced than what most Mac developers were expecting. Pleasant surprises include Interface Builder support and a full-fledged desktop simulator. And the API has a name: Cocoa Touch. (As suggested by Neven Mrgan on Twitter, perhaps we should start calling the iPhone apps “Safari Touch” and “Mail Touch” rather than “MobileSafari” and “MobileMail” when you need to specify the iPhone, rather than Mac, versions.)

The tools are, unsurprisingly, Mac-only. It’s a new version of the same Xcode and Interface Builder (and performance tuning) apps that Mac developers use today. This has the potential to do for Windows developers what the iPod did for Windows users — move them to the Mac.

Games

The games that were demoed today look pretty cool. Reports from people in attendance are gushing. The unique control options — no traditional buttons but a 3D accelerometer and multi-touch screen — make the iPhone analogous to the Wii, in that it opens up new concepts in game UI design. This also opens the iPhone to a new market — those who don’t want to buy a handheld that doesn’t have cool games.

The App Store

Apple’s 70/30 split with developers is steep, but initial reaction from the developers I follow on Twitter seems to be positive. Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba told me via IM, “70%? That’s… that’s… livable,” which seems to sum up the consensus sentiment.

There is no option to circumvent the App Store. A developer cannot, say, make their iPhone app available for download over the web, and have users copy it over to their iPhone through iTunes by hand. The App Store does allow for free apps, with all hosting costs covered by Apple. But, I suspect, developers won’t be allowed to deliver a “free” app through the App Store which requires a registration or license through the developer’s own web store.

My question, though, is how will this be enforced technically? If developers can install on their iPhones the apps they’re working on, what will stop users from doing the same? I’m guessing it’s tied to digital certificates, but that’s just a guess. There must be something, though.

The reasons developers are willing to accept a 70/30 split are simple: convenience and exposure. Apps sold via the iPhone App Store will be far easier to register and install than apps are for the Mac. Once you’ve registered for an iTunes Store account, your credentials are saved. No credit card numbers to type in, no emails to wait for containing serial numbers. It looks as easy to buy these apps as it is to buy songs. And the exposure of getting listed in a store that’s available to every iPhone user in the world is tremendous. It’s like Apple’s Software Downloads web site, but with one-click Buy buttons.

The $99 fee for getting your app listed in the store is a no-brainer. A bummer, perhaps, for the student set, but I suspect it’s intended as a bozo filter to keep the process from being inundated with glorified do-little “Hello World” apps.

In short, what developers lose per-transaction from Apple’s 30 percent take, they can more than make up for in volume. This is going to be a gold rush.

iFund

Speaking of which, I’m not sure I understand this $100 million iFund for iPhone software development, but it sure is a lot of money. Presumably this is for startups with very big ideas for iPhone software.

EDGE

Jobs was asked in the Q&A whether a VOIP app would be permitted, and he said yes, for Wi-Fi, but not for EDGE. Just how these sort of restrictions on EDGE use are going to be adjudicated and enforced aren’t clear, though. Given that Apple is emphasizing the location-aware features in the SDK, it seems as though access to EDGE must be at least relatively open. The restrictions are likely based on bandwidth needs, but that seems hard to enforce once and app is out in the wild.

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/2008/03/iphone_sdk_impressions_and_questions

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iPhone SDK QA Session

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 06 March 2008 03:55:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

The iPhone and iPod touch will support more than just third-party applications when their version 2....

Read The Full Article:
http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/03/06/iphone.sdk.qa.session/

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Sony XPERIA X1 on AT&T

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 06 March 2008 03:55:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Sony Ericsson's purported "iPhone killer" will join its rival on AT&T, technology demonstrations sug...

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http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/03/06/sony.xperia.x1.on.att/

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The Acid 3 Test

The Acid 3 Test has been officially released. The test has been in development for some time, with much of that development happening in the open.

The Acid 3 test is far more complex than the Acid 2 test. It covers a wider range of standards and consists of many more individual tests. Browsers have to render a sequence of boxes that display dynamically in a stairstep pattern. For every cluster of tests passed successfully, the boxes will fill in with a color, which signifies that all of the tests covered by that block have passed.

If you run Acid 3 on the shipping versions of current browsers (Firefox 2, Safari 3, Opera 9, IE7), you’ll see that they all score quite low. For example Safari 3 scores a 39/100. This percentage score is a bit misleading however. The situation with all four browser engines really isn’t that bad.

You can think of the Acid 3 test as consisting of 100 individual test suites. In order for a browser engine to claim one of these precious 100 points, it has to pass a whole battery of tests around a specific standard. In other words it’s like the browser is being asked to take 100 separate exams and score an A+ on each test in order to get any credit at all.

The reality is that all of the browsers are doing much better than their scores would have you believe, since the engines are often passing a majority of the subtests and experiencing minor failures that cost them the point for that section.

Shipping Safari scores a 39/100 with some significant rendering errors. We’ve been working hard since the test surfaced and are pleased to report that we’ve entered the “A” range on the test with a score of 90/100.

So what did we fix to gain so many points?

Bug 17064 has all the details, but here are the highlights.

Support for CSS3 Selectors
We added support for all of the remaining CSS3 selectors. These include selectors like nth-child, nth-of-type, last-child, last-of-type, etc. These selectors were already implemented in KHTML, and the KHTML developers had even kindly provided patches for us in the relevant WebKit bugs. Therefore it was a simple matter of taking those patches, updating them to the WebKit codebase, and then merging them in. A big thanks to the KHTML developers for their hard work in this area.

Parsing Bugs
WebKit had a number of minor parsing bugs that Acid 3 targeted. The boxes did not render properly because of an obscure parsing bug that the test exploited (thanks, Hixie). In addition a number of other parsing bugs kept us from completely passing individual tests. We have updated our parser to be much closer to the HTML5-specified parsing rules.

WebKit has also never parsed DOCTYPEs before. I re-wrote WebKit’s DOCTYPE parsing to match the HTML5 specification, and so now if you put a DOCTYPE into your page it will be present in the DOM. In addition many bugs centered around proper mode resolution (quirks vs. strict) have now been fixed. You can document.write a DOCTYPE for example in a new document and have the correct mode be selected.

SVG
Acid3 has many SVG tests. We’ve been hard at work making these tests pass. In particular SVG font support and other aspects of the SVG DOM have been tested. Many of the remaining 10 points are SVG failures. We’ll be working on SVG animation in order to pass the last few SVG tests.

DOM
Acid3 tests a lot of DOM level 2 features, like traversal and ranges. It particularly focuses on the “liveness” of objects, e.g., making sure everything updates properly when you dynamically change a document by adding/removing nodes. Most of our failures in this area had to do with not behaving properly in the presence of these dynamic changes (even though we tended to pass the more static tests).

Now that we’re closing in on 100%, we’ll be blogging about each fix as it happens, so that you can follow our progress from the blog.

Read The Full Article:
http://webkit.org/blog/158/the-acid-3-test/

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