iPhone OS 4.0: It’s The Little Things
(Image courtesy of Engadget)The iPhone OS 4.0 SDK has only been out for less than 24 hours, and already developers are hard at work mining the small nuggets of gold that didn’t take center stage at the Thursday announcement.AppleInsider has all of the details (complete with screenshots, which we can’t show you here since they’re under a non-disclosure agreement) on the small little extras that iPhone OS 4.0 promises to bring when it’s unleashed this summer.The most potential exciting of these is the existence of a new background process named iChatAgent -- the same process used by iChat on the Mac. This would seem to infer that Apple may include its own bundled instant messaging app with the next iPhone OS.There are also two new frameworks included that were not part of the iPad’s 3.2 release, called IMCore.framework and IMAVCore.framework. The files allegedly include the text strings “front facing” and “back facing” -- further evidence that the next iPhone hardware will at long last include a front-facing video camera for video chat as long rumored.Among the unannounced software improvements, Notes can now be synced over MobileMe (what took them so long?!), and Apple has added live web search suggestions to Safari, which was actually noted briefly in one of Steve Jobs’ presentation slides yesterday.The iPhone camera will get a couple of new improvements, including a 5x digital zoom and the addition of “tap to focus” for video recording. A new preference for MMS messaging now offers the ability to display the current character count.One of Mail’s hidden new features includes the ability to reduce the size of messages containing attachments to save space on your device, while Location Services will now offer the ability to turn its features on or off for each app that’s using them. The next-generation Internet Protocol, IPv6, also makes its first appearance in iPhone OS 4.0.Finally, the iPod app will allow you to (finally) create new playlists on your device, rather than having to create them on iTunes as we’ve become accustomed to for years. All good stuff! We look forward to seeing what other hidden gems remain…
http://www.maclife.com/article/news/iphone_os_40_it%E2%80%99s_little_things
