Category Archives: iphone

My WWDC 2009 Predictions

So I’m trying to keep awake while I’m on my flight to San Francisco for WWDC this coming week, I thought why not share my predictions about what’s going to be announced. I also figured this would be a good time to update my blog since I have quite a while before we land.

1. Snow Leopard

After looking at the sessions and labs for WWDC this year, I think it’s safe to say we’ll see a release of Snow Leopard. From what I’ve been able to read from the net it looks like it’s nearing RC/Gold status, so I think this will be one that will be talked about to death!

2. iPhone 3.0

As a beginning iPhone developer, I’ve been playing with some of the goodies in the 3.0 SDK since April. I’ve also had the chance to put it on a phone (since beta 2) and have seen it mature and become a stable working update. There’s definitely some features I’d really like to have on a day to day case, so hopefully this comes out at the conference and I’m not having to put the OS Beta on my standard use phone.

3. iPhone 3G v2

I think we will see this announced, but I don’t think it’s shipping until Julyish. One thing Apple did wrong last year was release several products as once which was a disaster (MobileMe, iPhone 2.0 OS, iPhone 3G)!! I think after last years mess, they’ll end up releasing the OS update at the conference, and the new phone in July.

4. iPod Touch v3

This I think they will de a device update on as well and it will be available after the keynote. It will include a new 64GB option. I also think that this will have a camera on it.

5. Minor Hardware Updates

This is something they’ve been doing without waiting for some sort of Press event or Conference, so I’m not sure if this is something we’ll actually see or not.

This pretty much sums up my predictions. I would love to be surprised by the “one more thing” but I’m not sure what this could be. I think the iPhone as a device doesn’t need to be this as pretty much everyone in the modern world are expecting this to come out. Personally I’m still waiting for a tablet or touch netbook. I’d like to see this at least announced next week with a ship date of sometime in July. If by chance this was something that was a reality, I’m sure they’d be sold out by the end of the conference. (I’d be coming home with at least 1) :)

Stay tuned for my after keynote post and other WWDC posts as the week goes on. I’ve got lots of ideas floating around, so we’ll have to see what’s under NDA and what we can talk about.

Objective Resource for Faster iPhone Development

I recently came across Objective Resource for developing iPhone applications that talk with a Rails backed website. According to the site,

ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails’ standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.

I’ve had a chance to play with it this weekend and have found it to be pretty easy to work with. The developers of Objective Resource have created a pretty good Getting Started Guide you can follow, or you can watch a screencast of it as well. They even offer an example project for you to work with that gives you both the iPhone app (via Xcode) and the Rails app so you can see how everything works together.

One thing the example project does not include is accessing a Rails app that has authentication. Of course I was thinking I was all setup for this, but soon realized that I did not add my Active Resource functions in so that my app would work with XML/JSON requests. Luckily, while I was out in Denver, CO for iPhone Development Training (by Pragmatic Studio) I was able to get my hands on a copy of Advanced Rails Recipes by Mike Clark. I was extremely pleased that Mike graciously gave me the copy he had laying there for free. The particular recipe in the book that helped me was the Authenticate REST Clients. After I rewrote my authentication piece of my Rails app, I was getting data back and into my iPhone app. It was a very good feeling!

I thought I would include the screencast that the Objective Resource developers created. It runs about 6 minutes and is definitely worth a watch if you are looking at using Objective Resource for your next iPhone app backed by a Rails app.


Getting Started with Objective Resource from Josh Vickery on Vimeo.