Heaven knows what this will mean for mobilecast. Hopefull the kick isn’t quite as severe as it appears in the video! We might have to resort to playing everything back through safari … or maybe we’ll find another way around this… perhaps we can integrate with the ipod app… or maybe we’ll be lucky & apple will get some sense and allow apps to run in the background as services.
This is a ridiculous restriction IMO. Android have the concept of a service I was hoping that the iphone SDK would offer something similar but they’ve gone to the other extreme, so far as to prohibit apps from running in the background! jeezzz.
Its bad enough that they’re looking for 30% off the top, but not trusting devs to produce well behaved apps that have to go through an approval process is really taking the mickey… this truly sucks the donkeys…
If you haven’t noticed I’m decidedly unimpressed, perhaps jailbreaking will live on?
We were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it. Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that - Steve Jobs
Overall this interview is very interesting & provides some great insight into how the man things & works.
Its a bit of a shame that Steve took this idea of data goes into the PDA/phone via a cable tethered to a computer a bit too far. Its a crying shame that you have had to sync your photos, calendar, contacts, podcasts etc via a cable. We’ve been shackled to itunes; I’m sure this was very intentional on the part of apple. The more folks experienced the ipod + itunes the more likely they were to become part of the apple ecosystem and go on to become mac users…
However, yesterdays announcements (video of the event in case you were under a rock and missed it) of app.store & the exchange integration was the first big departure from this model - you will now be able to sync your calendar & contacts and install apps over wifi- Yay! Obviously apple are following the money with the exchange integration. I know a bunch of blackberry users that would only love to switch to the iphone but the lack of push email & cisco vpn was a real barrier to them. The ability to install apps over wifi is probably a direct reaction to installer.app from the jaibreak community - apple clearly want to make jailbreaking phones a thing of the past. I also noticed that google announced calendar sync improvements yesterday but alas we still can’t sync this with the phones calendar over wifi. Regardless of what the drivers are, its nice to have the shackles loosened a wee bit.
I wonder if they will allow us to sync photos & podcasts over wifi in the not too distant future?
I’m hoping to put out at least one more release of mobilecast before moving my phone to the 2.0 beta. I will be downloading & installing the SDK as soon as the apple developer site comes back online though.
iLounge are reporting that the SDK will be released today & that “Apple will act as a gatekeeper for applications, deciding which are and are not worthy of release”… hmm I really hope they don’t cripple things with a lengthy approval process. No doubt if they do, then jailbreak will live on… I would have thought that one of the goals of releasing an official SDK is to make jailbreaking a pointless exercise.
I wonder if the iLounge source was at apples internal townhall held yesterday.
This is on the back of yesterdays report from macscoop that the SDK will require OSX Leopard & that apple will keep a small percentage of revenue from each app. Hopefully free apps won’t be subject to any charges. Neither of these predictions are surprising IMO - I’d expect that they are applying the same model to apps as itunes applies to music.. i.e. they will take their slice of revenue but ultimately itunes is a supporting site/service that helps drive sales of apple devices (phone, pod, etc).
I just finished listening to the latest episode of TWIT. I was quite interested by the conversation they had about podcast clients in general & how the ipod isn’t the perfect podcast client. The lack of the ability to sync & stream over wifi were highlighted as serious issues. I must admit that I hadn’t considered offering the option of creating podcasts from within mobilecast, its certainly food for thought. I have been thinking about offering an audio commenting feature though, but I’ll post more on that later… I must admit that I was a little disappointed that none of panel had ever heard of mobilecast. Hopefully we’ll get an SDK tomorrow & that’ll pave the way to getting mobilecast in the hands of the masses as an official 3rd party app (not just the brave & caviler that opted to jailbreak).
We just implemented a long standing feature request to allow you to stream podcasts rather than download them. I must admit that I wasn’t at all excited by this feature until I implemented it, now I can’t understand how I lived without it! Its absolutely super. If we detect a wifi connection, the play button is made selectable & you can stream the podcast. Obviously you can still download & save the podcast for later playback. I encountered an issue with streaming videos, so I opted to just open them in safari for now. Its all working quite well. Please download the latest 2.2.4 svn version from our downloads page and let us know what you think!
P S - I’m thinking that we should do a 2.2.4 release candidate very very soon.
