CUPERTINO, Calif. – If you think people can do a lot of things on
their iPhones now, wait until the new version of the operating system
becomes standard later this year.
It won't be too long before you're listening to a fellow iPhone user's
iTunes music collection, computing your insulin dosage in seconds if you
are diabetic, or following a turn-by-turn Google Maps geopositioning
application to your destination.
At a full-house event on its campus here, Apple on March 17 previewed
its much-anticipated iPhone OS 3.0 software and announced the immediate
availability of a beta software release to registered developers.
The iPhone OS 3.0 beta release includes an updated software development
kit featuring more than 1,000 new APIs (application programming
interfaces), including In-App Purchases; new peer-to-peer connections; a
new application interface for accessories; access to the iPod music
library; a new maps API, and push notifications.
To view a slide show on highlights of the iPhone 3.0 rollout, go here.
While the Apple iPhone OS 3 is in beta right now, the company plans to
roll out the full version by the summer. The software development kit,
or SDK, is available for developers right now. Apple also announced that its App Store now contains 25,000 apps for the iPhone.
There are more than 100 new features in iPhone OS 3.0. More than
800,000 downloads of the previous iPhone SDK have been made, and the
paid developer community now numbers more than 50,000, said Scott
Forstall, Apple's senior vice president for iPhone software.
Forstall highlighted several of those new capabilities. Here are some of them:
--In-App Purchases: When using a paid Web service, such as reading the
Wall Street Journal or subscribing to a sports or gaming service, you
can choose to maintain your subscription or membership without having
to leave the app itself. (See Page 6 of the accompanying slide show.) The new OS brings up a service that links to the site you're using and conveys the payment.
--Cut, Copy and Paste: Amazing as it seems, this relatively
simple-sounding tool has not yet been available on the iPhone. With OS
3.0, users will be able to select type, photos or graphics (from a Web site, for example), copy them,
and then enter into another application -- such as e-mail or a text
message -- as needed. It took a while longer to develop, Forstall said,
due to security concerns.
--New Peer-to-Peer capability: Users of the new OS will be able to link
up with other iPhone users via stereo Bluetooth; thus, they will be
able to browse another user's iTunes collection of music and videos, and
even stream them to their own iPhones. The fellow iPhone users have to
be within range of Bluetooth, of course. Other users will be able to
play games against each other (think kids in the back of a car on a
long trip); no Wi-Fi network is needed. All the iPhones will find each
other automatically.
--New Push Notifications help scale out business apps: This is a
unified, generic service for all platforms and developers, and it is located in
Apple's own server farm, Forstall said. The ESPN app that sends out 50
million news alerts per month is a good example; it can
scale out with impunity using this capability. Lots of other
applications are expected to follow suit.
--Improved Maps: In partnership with Google Maps, Apple has made the
core of the map application available free to developers, so they can
consider using them in the applications they intend to build. Included
are all the features currently in Google Maps: regular map view,
topographic view, and street view; annotations and location tracking is
also in the SDK.
--Accessories: More connections to iPhone accessories will now
available. For example, stereo sound-balancing and other, more granular
fine-tuning features can be added to the iPhone when it plugs in to a
portable speaker set to play music.
--Johnson & Johnson's Lifescan application for diabetics can be a
real time-saver. A user can keep track or his/her dosage history and
schedule, and calculate the amount of each dosage based on what he/she
is eating that day -- plus factor in the kind of physical activities
the user is experiencing that day. All are major factors in getting an
insulin dosage correct.
For more detail on the iPhone OS 3.0 or to join the beta developer program, go here.
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