Apple Development Center

The Wall Street Journal has released this video featuring iPhone games. These games, mostly in the puzzle genre, are easy and fun to play because of the iPhone’s touch screen and other sensors that allow the game to know how you hold and move the device.

A new security flaw has been discovered that allows unauthorized access to private data stored on an iPhone. When a user sets up a passcode lock for the iPhone, the device still allows some information to be accessed. This means that anyone with access to the device can see certain data that is stored on your iPhone. Although this may be a security flaw in a way, it could also be useful. It could be used to store emergency contact information and numbers so that people could access it without knowing the passcode to gain access to the entire device. I think Apple should build this in as a more prominent feature instead of having it kind of hidden so that people think its a security flaw.

A recent blog post on CNN money talks about a few problems that have arisen since the inception of the App Store for iPhone and iPod touch devices.  The App Store is a new feature in the latest version of the iPhone OS that allows users to download applications directly onto their devices.  The App Store, which offers about 1,500 applications, has generally been a success, but there have been a few things that have come up since the the its launch.  Some applications have been removed from the App Store by Apple, causing the news to make headlines around the internet.  One was a movies application that was pulled for unknown reasons, and another was a program costing $999.99 that didn’t have a purpose other than to waste money.  Also of interest is the fact that a feature that causes the iPhone to contact Apple servers to retrieve a blacklist of any programs that Apple wants to disable.  This means that if Apple wants to disable a certain program, even after users have downloaded and installed it, they can still remotely do so by adding it to the blacklist.

A recent survey from Yankee Group Research Inc. reports that 8 in 10 businesses now use Apple Mac computers. This is almost double the amount from only 2 years ago. The Yankee Group surveyed over 700 senior IT managers and C-level executives. Out of those surveyed, 21% reported having over 50 Macs. One reason that many organizations are using more Macs now is because of the ability to virtualize many different OS’s on Apple hardware. Many organizations are using the Mac computers to run Vista, XP, Mac OS, and other operating systems. Laura DiDio from Yankee Group stated that many organizations are using virtualization products from Parallels and VMware. DiDio also said that the reason many organizations do not fully adopt Apple hardware to replace their current hardware is because the management tools and enterprise support is lacking from Apple.

Although Apple’s corporate market share is still only 8-10%, its still up from the 1-2% a few years ago. This can be very promising for Apple as well as those who use and create products for Apple products. Software developers can especially benefit from the increase in Apple products. If the trends keep continuing this way, Apple software development could become much more popular - especially with the availability of the free software development tools from Apple.

Apple has just released the 8th edition of the iPhone SDK. This version is the beta release 8, and includes XCode 3.1. This version includes everything that is needed to author, test and publish software applications for the iPhone OS. The new iPhone SDK is fully compatible with iPhone OS 2.0 and will be necessary to use in order to sign applications to submit them to the App Store. Apple also notes that in order to publish applications in the App Store, users must be a member of their iPhone Developer Program. The 8th beta release also includes everything that was in all the previous versions, such as the full XCode IDE, the iPhone simulator with OpenGL support, and much more. In addition to iPhone applications the XCode IDE also allows users to create applications for Mac OS X. The iPhone SDK can be downloaded directly from Apple’s website, but you must be registered first.