The iPhone 5.
00:00:00
◼
►
Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing
00:00:04
◼
►
news of note in iOS development, Apple, and the like. I'm your host, David Smith. I'm
00:00:08
◼
►
an independent iOS and Mac developer based in Herne, Virginia. This is show number 81,
00:00:12
◼
►
and today is Friday, September 21st. Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes,
00:00:17
◼
►
so let's get started.
00:00:18
◼
►
All right, so it's a very exciting day. I have in my hand my iPhone 5. It just got delivered
00:00:23
◼
►
about 10 o'clock Eastern and couldn't be more excited about it.
00:00:28
◼
►
It is a beautiful device.
00:00:30
◼
►
I ended up getting a black one, which I think was a good choice,
00:00:33
◼
►
at least in the near term, which I'll talk about in a little bit.
00:00:36
◼
►
But for today's show, I'm just going to talk about the iPhone 5.
00:00:39
◼
►
I'm going to talk about some of the functional parts of that
00:00:42
◼
►
and also just some of the things that it may impact you as a developer.
00:00:46
◼
►
So first, first impressions, it is thin.
00:00:48
◼
►
It is light.
00:00:50
◼
►
It is quite impressive.
00:00:52
◼
►
I mean, you kind of get the vibe when Johnny Ive says all those nice things about it that
00:00:57
◼
►
it's going to be pretty fancy, and it's pretty fancy.
00:01:00
◼
►
I mean, the camphor edge along the side is beautiful.
00:01:03
◼
►
It's a little less sharp compared to the iPhone 4, which is quite nice, which I wasn't expecting
00:01:09
◼
►
just in terms of it feels a bit more comfortable in a hand.
00:01:14
◼
►
It's light, fairly solid.
00:01:16
◼
►
I mean, if you don't have one coming today, definitely stop by an Apple store.
00:01:21
◼
►
pick one up, it's good to get a feel of it, because it feels very different than the phone
00:01:26
◼
►
that you've had before, especially in terms of the screen size.
00:01:29
◼
►
I got a black one, and I think that was a good decision, at least in the near term,
00:01:33
◼
►
because letterbox apps you barely notice to some degree, because the letterboxing just
00:01:40
◼
►
disappears into the border on the top and bottom.
00:01:43
◼
►
If you got a white one, it would probably be a bit more noticeable.
00:01:46
◼
►
Please don't let your letterbox apps exist in the store for very long, though.
00:01:50
◼
►
super easy to take care of for almost every application.
00:01:52
◼
►
I know if you have some super custom thing, you're out of some trouble.
00:01:56
◼
►
But please take care of that.
00:01:59
◼
►
It's one of those funny things where on one hand you could say, maybe there's going to
00:02:03
◼
►
be 10 million, 20 million iPhone 5s in the next couple months.
00:02:07
◼
►
But on the flip side of that, the people who are buying them are most excited about their
00:02:13
◼
►
technology that's in their hands.
00:02:15
◼
►
and compared to the whatever 300 million existing iOS devices.
00:02:20
◼
►
And so you want to get those excited people,
00:02:22
◼
►
with their excited wallets, into the app store and buying your apps.
00:02:25
◼
►
And so you want to be optimized, you want to look great on the new iPhone.
00:02:28
◼
►
And so it really shouldn't be too bad.
00:02:30
◼
►
Mostly it's just you take a default PNG of the new size,
00:02:34
◼
►
throw it into your application, and it will start running in that mode.
00:02:37
◼
►
If you're doing something that's vertically scrolling,
00:02:40
◼
►
which it seems like 80% of iPhone apps do some kind of vertical scrolling,
00:02:44
◼
►
that's basically all you'll have to do.
00:02:47
◼
►
And the only changes I've had to make for the most part,
00:02:49
◼
►
in my audiobooks app, I had to make the settings screen
00:02:52
◼
►
and the player screen slightly different.
00:02:54
◼
►
The settings screen, I just turned into a table view,
00:02:56
◼
►
so it used to be a static list of options that you'd toggle.
00:02:59
◼
►
Now it's just a table view, because that's better,
00:03:01
◼
►
it's more flexible down the road,
00:03:03
◼
►
and it also just made my transition much simpler.
00:03:06
◼
►
And the player screen, I just had to do a few tweaks,
00:03:08
◼
►
specifically around things where, like,
00:03:11
◼
►
I have an ad that scrolls in and out on the bottom,
00:03:13
◼
►
and out on the bottom, and then you make sure it was actually the bottom and not what I
00:03:16
◼
►
used to think was the bottom because I was lazy and just did, you know, 460 as the bounding
00:03:22
◼
►
height for the view.
00:03:24
◼
►
But otherwise, it's really not hard.
00:03:26
◼
►
Please do that.
00:03:27
◼
►
It's very straightforward.
00:03:28
◼
►
Apple has been very responsive about getting things turned around.
00:03:31
◼
►
I got all my apps approved.
00:03:33
◼
►
The last ones came this morning, which was a little later than I would have liked, but
00:03:37
◼
►
there's certainly nothing too bad.
00:03:39
◼
►
Let's see, otherwise, performance is going to be
00:03:42
◼
►
a funny thing for this, because the iPhone 5's performance
00:03:45
◼
►
is so much faster than all the other devices.
00:03:49
◼
►
It is noticeable, the 4S before, I'd be like,
00:03:52
◼
►
I remember when I got my 4S, I'm like,
00:03:53
◼
►
oh man, this is awesome, it's so fast, it's so great.
00:03:56
◼
►
But now I pick up the 5 and it's like,
00:03:59
◼
►
oh man, that 4S was slow, it was dog slow.
00:04:03
◼
►
So that's going to be kind of a funny thing,
00:04:06
◼
►
because from a performance perspective,
00:04:09
◼
►
actually it was kind of a funny joke I made
00:04:13
◼
►
earlier in the week, was I had to do all my performance work
00:04:15
◼
►
on my weather app before today, because after today
00:04:18
◼
►
I'm not going to be very motivated to do it,
00:04:20
◼
►
because I'm not going to be graded on it
00:04:22
◼
►
unless I use my old 4S a lot,
00:04:24
◼
►
because it's just not, I won't see it.
00:04:28
◼
►
I mean, my app launches, I spend a lot of time
00:04:30
◼
►
on my launch speed for my app,
00:04:32
◼
►
and it's basically instantaneous now.
00:04:33
◼
►
On my 4S, I got it down to maybe like half a second, something like that.
00:04:38
◼
►
0.34 I think was the best phone I ever had.
00:04:43
◼
►
I haven't actually done my instrumentation to measure it,
00:04:48
◼
►
but it's probably less than a tenth of a second,
00:04:50
◼
►
where at some point you just stop noticing it.
00:04:53
◼
►
That said, obviously I still want to be supportive of the older devices.
00:04:56
◼
►
I mean, the majority of my users aren't going to be on the iPhone 5 probably.
00:04:59
◼
►
And so I want to make sure I'm certainly working backwards
00:05:02
◼
►
But it's a nice thing to know that maybe
00:05:04
◼
►
in a couple of years-- it's the classic thing.
00:05:07
◼
►
If you keep moving, you keep kicking the can to some degree.
00:05:10
◼
►
But in a couple of years, if this is the base phone,
00:05:12
◼
►
if this is the new 4 in two years or three years,
00:05:17
◼
►
this is a great device for that.
00:05:19
◼
►
Because basic operations just are instantaneous.
00:05:22
◼
►
Now, I'm sure you can do things to push the limits of that.
00:05:25
◼
►
But basic operations are just so much faster.
00:05:27
◼
►
And that's awesome.
00:05:29
◼
►
Let's see, the screen itself looks gorgeous.
00:05:31
◼
►
I think you're going to need to--
00:05:33
◼
►
now that I'm looking at some of the stuff I'm doing,
00:05:35
◼
►
it's like I may need to work a little bit on some of my colors
00:05:38
◼
►
and things to make them really pop on the new screen,
00:05:42
◼
►
because it is just such a gorgeous, sort of nicely,
00:05:44
◼
►
sort of deep saturation levels, good solid blacks.
00:05:48
◼
►
There's even some of my font sizes and in choice,
00:05:50
◼
►
I'm going to have to tweak a little bit because just the way it looks.
00:05:55
◼
►
Let's see, what else about the phone?
00:05:57
◼
►
And see, it's just a surprising thing.
00:06:03
◼
►
I've had an iPhone in my pocket for a very long time,
00:06:05
◼
►
and I wasn't expecting this to be surprised.
00:06:08
◼
►
I was expecting to like it, but it's surprisingly good.
00:06:11
◼
►
It feels good in my hand.
00:06:13
◼
►
I'm going to struggle a little bit with the reaching all the way
00:06:17
◼
►
to the top thing with the 16 by 9 screen.
00:06:19
◼
►
I think I'm going to get used to it.
00:06:20
◼
►
I've always had a little bit of a trouble with that.
00:06:24
◼
►
It's just one of those-- I don't have chocolate berry hands,
00:06:26
◼
►
So it's not like one of those, like, I need to--
00:06:28
◼
►
so as always, I think I've held it sort of slightly different
00:06:32
◼
►
anyway in terms of being able to reach the whole screen.
00:06:34
◼
►
And so it's not as big of a transition,
00:06:36
◼
►
but I'll definitely notice that.
00:06:38
◼
►
But overall, it's definitely a nice thing.
00:06:39
◼
►
And for most apps, I've really enjoyed the extra real estate
00:06:43
◼
►
so far just in playing with it.
00:06:44
◼
►
In terms of I open up Instapaper and I--
00:06:47
◼
►
it's not something like that where you're just
00:06:49
◼
►
trying to read content.
00:06:50
◼
►
You can just go an extra two or three lines
00:06:52
◼
►
before having to sort of flip to the next page.
00:06:55
◼
►
And so that's just awesome.
00:06:59
◼
►
Sound quality is great.
00:07:00
◼
►
Otherwise, yeah.
00:07:01
◼
►
I mean, that's most of what I was
00:07:03
◼
►
going to say about the phone itself.
00:07:04
◼
►
I mean, it's just a gorgeous thing.
00:07:06
◼
►
Definitely check it out if you aren't lucky enough to have one.
00:07:09
◼
►
Definitely go to the Apple Store and check one out and get one.
00:07:13
◼
►
Or get one to hold on to so you can play with it
00:07:16
◼
►
and kind of get a good sense of it.
00:07:19
◼
►
Let's try, I think.
00:07:19
◼
►
So really some design considerations as a developer
00:07:22
◼
►
and what it means with a new phone.
00:07:23
◼
►
Some things you definitely are-- from now on,
00:07:27
◼
►
I'm increasingly nervous about where
00:07:32
◼
►
Apple is going in terms of the stability of screen sizes.
00:07:35
◼
►
And specifically, I'm thinking about the iPad in terms of it's
00:07:41
◼
►
great that they've been so stable.
00:07:43
◼
►
It's been 1024 by 768 and 320 by 480 for years.
00:07:48
◼
►
And that's made life a lot really easy for us.
00:07:50
◼
►
And the problem is it's allowed us to be pretty
00:07:52
◼
►
lazy for a lot of things. I know I've done this a lot where you just hardcode stuff and
00:07:58
◼
►
other than handling rotation, you don't really have to worry about it. And there's this inkling
00:08:02
◼
►
that I had after seeing this that it wouldn't surprise me if at some point there's a version
00:08:07
◼
►
of the iPad that's 16 by 9. And maybe it's not the big one or maybe it's a new small
00:08:13
◼
►
one or a version of the iPad Mini or something. But it feels nice. There's a couple of things,
00:08:19
◼
►
especially for things like reading, where it would work really well.
00:08:22
◼
►
And for movies, like, it fits.
00:08:24
◼
►
And so I'm definitely starting to think, and I think as all the development I'd be
00:08:29
◼
►
doing forward, I'm going to make sure I'm very flexible in the vertical dimension.
00:08:32
◼
►
I think Apple is pretty safe.
00:08:34
◼
►
They would only change one dimension of the thing.
00:08:37
◼
►
So if they were going to change the iPad, I think they'd likely make it, it would
00:08:43
◼
►
would still be 768 as the narrow one, and then whatever 768 times 16 over 9 is, whatever
00:08:50
◼
►
that math works out to, in height. And so I'm not sure about that. That's a wild speculation,
00:08:57
◼
►
but that's just the sort of the gut I'm getting and something that I'm going to be keeping
00:09:00
◼
►
in the back of my mind that I want to be careful about.
00:09:03
◼
►
Other things that are more iOS, just generally iOS 6 related, Smart App banners are now available
00:09:09
◼
►
in iOS 6, and this is one of my little pet peeves,
00:09:12
◼
►
so I'm just going to emphasize it here.
00:09:13
◼
►
I wrote a blog post.
00:09:14
◼
►
The show notes are in--
00:09:17
◼
►
there's a link in the show notes to my site.
00:09:18
◼
►
It takes like two minutes to implement this on your site.
00:09:21
◼
►
And Smart App Owners, in a nutshell,
00:09:23
◼
►
is a way that Apple has now sort of promoted and galvanized
00:09:29
◼
►
for if you want to create a link to your app on your website,
00:09:32
◼
►
this is how you do it.
00:09:33
◼
►
You add a little meta tag to the top of your HTML,
00:09:36
◼
►
and that's it.
00:09:36
◼
►
Apple takes care of the rest.
00:09:37
◼
►
is a really smart, clever thing where if they have the app, it'll launch it.
00:09:41
◼
►
They don't have the app.
00:09:43
◼
►
It'll show them the price and a Buy button.
00:09:45
◼
►
If they already have bought it but haven't installed it,
00:09:48
◼
►
they get an Install button.
00:09:50
◼
►
It's exactly what you want.
00:09:52
◼
►
Please do this.
00:09:52
◼
►
Any time I see a pop-up now being like, hey, get our app.
00:09:56
◼
►
Don't get our-- when I visit your website, I'm going to be very angry.
00:10:00
◼
►
I'm probably not going to install your app.
00:10:03
◼
►
And I'm probably just going to close the site and move on.
00:10:07
◼
►
because clearly you're not caring about me and my experience in the way that I'd like
00:10:10
◼
►
to be taken care of.
00:10:11
◼
►
Really, it takes two minutes just to do it, think, don't forget about it.
00:10:15
◼
►
iOS 6 adoption is through the roof.
00:10:17
◼
►
I think the last I saw it was about 28%, about 48 hours in.
00:10:20
◼
►
So this is almost all your users are going to be on iOS 6, which means they'll have iOS
00:10:27
◼
►
app banners.
00:10:28
◼
►
So please do that as quickly as you can.
00:10:30
◼
►
Let's see other things.
00:10:33
◼
►
One last funny thing, of course, is the iPhone 5 is the first of the ARMv7s processors.
00:10:40
◼
►
I'm not too familiar with the exact low-level details of that.
00:10:43
◼
►
I believe it changes and improves some of the floating-point operation stuff.
00:10:47
◼
►
I was looking at it a little bit, but I'm not a huge processor guy.
00:10:50
◼
►
The kind of funny thing is what they've done, Apple's done, is now essentially the Xcode
00:10:55
◼
►
in its default state will only support ARMv7 and ARMv7s, which means you can no longer
00:11:01
◼
►
support the iPhone 3G or below natively.
00:11:06
◼
►
You can hack things around, you can use old versions of Xcode, but you cannot in a supported
00:11:11
◼
►
fashion build for both ARMv6 and ARMv7s, which is fine in my experience.
00:11:16
◼
►
Very few users are on the 3G anymore. There's going to be some.
00:11:21
◼
►
You're going to annoy some people, but just sort of embrace that and move on.
00:11:26
◼
►
library provider if you're someone who provides a
00:11:30
◼
►
so-so's first that if you built frameworks for things for code
00:11:34
◼
►
could rebuild your frameworks as soon as you can because you get a compiler error
00:11:38
◼
►
and warning and things
00:11:39
◼
►
if you don't have an army sevens
00:11:41
◼
►
s slice for the new iphone
00:11:43
◼
►
and your friend work sets can important thing to do if you are one of those
00:11:46
◼
►
people i ran into that person when the frame is amusing and it's like
00:11:49
◼
►
it's just kind of annoying
00:11:51
◼
►
uh... anyway that's it for today show
00:11:53
◼
►
i'll probably picking up again
00:11:54
◼
►
in the next couple of shows talking about the weather app arc that I've been working
00:11:58
◼
►
I had some kind of fun things happen.
00:12:00
◼
►
Like yesterday I finished my localization work, so I got my translations back from service
00:12:05
◼
►
I'm going to do an episode just walking through localization, how that works.
00:12:09
◼
►
I did a whole fun thing about accessibility in my weather app where it does a bunch of
00:12:13
◼
►
-- it's doing what I hope is smart accessibility rather than just doing the simple stuff of
00:12:18
◼
►
like displaying, you know, making sure that the label is set correctly.
00:12:21
◼
►
It turns my phone into actually kind of more like a weatherman.
00:12:24
◼
►
Like you open it up and you swipe around and it's telling you things about the weather
00:12:28
◼
►
rather than just showing you what's on the screen.
00:12:30
◼
►
And a bunch of other things.
00:12:31
◼
►
The app's going well.
00:12:32
◼
►
I'm hoping to submit next Friday, so I've got about a week left of work.
00:12:36
◼
►
Though it's pretty much done.
00:12:37
◼
►
I'm just polishing, sending out beta testing, that kind of stuff.
00:12:41
◼
►
I'll be submitting next week.
00:12:42
◼
►
And then I'm happy to announce that I'll be targeting an October 17th release date, which
00:12:48
◼
►
I'm kind of excited about.
00:12:49
◼
►
So October 17, circle out on your calendars.
00:12:51
◼
►
That's when I'll be launching my new weather app
00:12:54
◼
►
to be named shortly as part of the marketing build up
00:12:59
◼
►
That's still about a month out.
00:13:00
◼
►
So it's a little while.
00:13:03
◼
►
And at this point, it's just little teasers here and there.
00:13:06
◼
►
But definitely stay tuned if you're interested in kind
00:13:08
◼
►
of how this whole process goes that I started talking
00:13:10
◼
►
about a couple weeks ago.
00:13:12
◼
►
And hopefully I'll be talking about as it goes down the road.
00:13:16
◼
►
All right, hope you guys have a great weekend.
00:13:18
◼
►
Enjoy your iPhone 5s, either your own or your friends, or the ones you can pick up at the
00:13:23
◼
►
Apple Store.
00:13:24
◼
►
It's always a fun time when we get new hardware.
00:13:25
◼
►
Otherwise, I hope you guys have some happy coding, and I will talk to you next week.