iPhone Development Blog

Hi All,

With the upcoming launch of the iTablet comes the rumours and potential leaks about the new features that we can expect to see.

Based on speculations being put out by several sources at the moment, the expected (or possibly wished) features due for OS 4.0 are as follows

• Multi Touch Gestures – As with the current gestures available in safari and when viewing photos, this is said to be expanding OS wide. This means that the gesture system will work in all areas of OS.
• Updating UI – To assist with the new gesture system, there is said to be improves to the user interface to make it more efficient and easier to navigate. Hopefully there will be some improves to a the current home-screen system which will allow better app management.
• New syncing abilities – The information about this rumour is still very vague but there is meant to be some new way of syncing information such as contacts and calendar entries. Hopfully the OS 4.0 SDK will allow some integration with the calendar system for the developers out there.
• Multi-tasking – Yes, that’s right.. there is supposed to be multi-tasking features brought into OS 4.0 which will allow you to run background applications. Now this opens up a whole new world for development as developers could start looking at making apps that don’t need to be open for you to get updates or access information. Good examples of where this fails at the moment is quite simply Twitter and Skype. This does however bring a whole new aspect the the current applications that are on the market. Quite a few of these apps will be designed to make the most use out of being the only Application running, with the use of multi-tasking will this effect the performance of these apps and make them not even worth playing anymore? Will the game industry have more of a challenge to bring out games that look and play great while you have 5 other apps running in the background? We’ll just have to see on that one.

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Now that’s a title I never though I would be writing down. Based on recent rumours Microsoft are in talks with Apple to make Bing the new replacement for Google on the iPhones.

Microsoft seems to be aiming to push Google off the iPhone ladder to try and get a piece of that lovely money-pie that Google is running away with. Every time a user clicks an advert in Safari from the Google search result, Google gets paid by the advertiser. Microsoft however does not currently stand chance of making money via the same means as users need to download a seperate app for Bing (or mess around with safari) and to be quite honest, who really wants to use Bing for searches. So… with this in mind, Microsoft are meant to be making an arrangement with Apple that will put Microsoft in the lime-light and leave Google resting on the Android front.

A comment from Bloomberg states: “the talks have been under way for weeks, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t public. The negotiations may not be concluded quickly and might still fall apart, the people said.”

With over 70 million iPhone users, that would be a massive boost to Microsoft and quite potentially a huge dent for Google.

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