Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing

00:00:07 ◼   ► news of note and iOS development, Apple and the like. I'm your host, David Smith. I'm

00:00:09 ◼   ► an independent iOS developer based in Virginia. This is show number 142, and today is Tuesday,

00:00:14 ◼   ► September 10th. The Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's

00:00:18 ◼   ► get started.

00:00:19 ◼   ► All right, so this is the first impressions from today's Apple event show. I'm not sure

00:00:24 ◼   ► how long it'll end up being, but I just kind of -- what I find is sometimes kind of fun

00:00:27 ◼   ► is kind of fun is to talk about my initial impressions and then to give a, you know,

00:00:31 ◼   ► sort of my usual schedule, maybe sort of Thursday, Friday this week, I'll give a more, I don't

00:00:37 ◼   ► even know, like once it's all sunk in, and a lot of people have kind of mulled it over

00:00:41 ◼   ► and we see exactly what happens. But these are kind of my first impressions. So the event

00:00:45 ◼   ► itself was roughly as expected, which is, which is good and bad, I suppose. In some

00:00:52 ◼   ► ways it makes me happy when things go as expected because when you make your livelihood on the

00:00:57 ◼   ► basis of the success of something, in some ways the last thing you want is change. Change

00:01:03 ◼   ► is just dangerous. It's not necessarily good or bad. It's just dangerous. You never know

00:01:07 ◼   ► what's going to happen. You never know if Apple goes off the rails in a weird way or

00:01:14 ◼   ► if they introduce new software that competes with your own, you get Sherlock. All those

00:01:17 ◼   ► kinds of things are just -- it creates a certain amount of uncertainty. So generally it would

00:01:21 ◼   ► sort of as expected. And so what I tried to do, though, is after the event, after, you

00:01:25 ◼   ► know, sitting there reading all the live blogs, participating a little bit in the conversation

00:01:29 ◼   ► on Twitter and so on, and talking about sort of what happened, I tried to take a step back

00:01:34 ◼   ► and be like, if I was just a normal consumer, what would I think of this, this update? And

00:01:39 ◼   ► I think it's probably one of the most significant updates to the iPhone for quite a while, from

00:01:48 ◼   ► from a customer-facing perspective.

00:01:50 ◼   ► It's the biggest obvious change.

00:01:51 ◼   ► If you're in a mall, walking down,

00:01:55 ◼   ► and you look in the window, and rather than seeing the iPhone

00:01:58 ◼   ► that looks kind of like the iPhone's always been

00:02:01 ◼   ► for a while, it's now colorful.

00:02:03 ◼   ► It's got this very much more vibrant visual appearance,

00:02:07 ◼   ► and this much more varied visual appearance.

00:02:11 ◼   ► I think you'd be like, huh, I wonder what Apple's doing there,

00:02:14 ◼   ► or I wonder what's going on there.

00:02:16 ◼   ► And I think that's pretty interesting.

00:02:17 ◼   ► And then when you see something kind of like what they did with the fingerprint recognition,

00:02:23 ◼   ► it's kind of one of those cooler things.

00:02:25 ◼   ► It's a very tactile, kind of show and tell kind of a feature that I think will get a

00:02:31 ◼   ► lot of interest in it.

00:02:32 ◼   ► And I think in that sense it was a very -- it's a very solid lineup this fall.

00:02:36 ◼   ► And I would expect anyway that it will do pretty well.

00:02:40 ◼   ► I think the changes that they made in terms of sort of switching up the lineup in the

00:02:47 ◼   ► this way, I think ultimately is mostly just a marketing, it's a very much a market marketing,

00:02:53 ◼   ► driven driven maneuver, that is clearly going after different segments of the market. That

00:02:59 ◼   ► Apple is rather than just playing the high end sort of premium, they only ever sell sort

00:03:08 ◼   ► of what was once the best phone approach with one or two models, essentially, they're wildly

00:03:14 ◼   ► diversifying in the hopes, I imagine, of sort of capitalizing on a wider user base, of appealing

00:03:20 ◼   ► to different people for who they may have been discouraged to get from otherwise. And

00:03:25 ◼   ► then the reality is they took the best, I mean, it's not even just my opinion as someone

00:03:31 ◼   ► who really likes Apple products. They took the best phone, according to a lot of people,

00:03:35 ◼   ► a lot of surveys, a lot of reports, a lot of those types of more objective measures,

00:03:40 ◼   ► And they made it better.

00:03:41 ◼   ► You know, the 5S is a better phone than the 5 that I have sitting on my desk right now,

00:03:48 ◼   ► in terms of, you know, it's faster, it has a better camera, and it has a fingerprint

00:03:53 ◼   ► sensor on it, which are probably the three features that are probably most notable as

00:03:57 ◼   ► improved.

00:03:58 ◼   ► And all those together is definitely cool, and I'm definitely, you know, I'm going to

00:04:01 ◼   ► get one.

00:04:02 ◼   ► And then they took, rather than taking the 5, which is a very, very solid phone, I mean,

00:04:07 ◼   ► And I'm very happy with my 5.

00:04:08 ◼   ► And if it weren't for the fact that I've seen what a 5S is,

00:04:12 ◼   ► I'd be pretty happy to keep using it for a while.

00:04:15 ◼   ► They took that, and they made it interesting in another way.

00:04:18 ◼   ► So rather than just being, oh, that's last year's phone,

00:04:20 ◼   ► it's a new phone.

00:04:21 ◼   ► Its internals are basically the same.

00:04:23 ◼   ► And Apple can probably take advantage

00:04:24 ◼   ► of a lot of the economies of scale

00:04:27 ◼   ► that they have going with that.

00:04:28 ◼   ► But the exterior is very different.

00:04:31 ◼   ► It looks nothing like a previous phone.

00:04:33 ◼   ► And so now on the lower end, for $100,

00:04:36 ◼   ► can get into an iPhone and be able to sort of get into that and start using an iPhone

00:04:43 ◼   ► if you weren't able to do that previously without feeling like you're buying something

00:04:46 ◼   ► that's old. So both of those I think are huge things. And I think they're, you know, I think

00:04:54 ◼   ► it makes me feel good about, you know, sort of hitching my wagon to Apple in terms of

00:05:00 ◼   ► this is where I'm going to make my living. This is the app store I'm going to focus on.

00:05:04 ◼   ► I feel pretty good about it.

00:05:06 ◼   ► It seems like they're making solid progress.

00:05:10 ◼   ► And it's solid and incremental and not dramatic.

00:05:12 ◼   ► And that's good.

00:05:13 ◼   ► And so overall, I'm pretty happy.

00:05:15 ◼   ► I think the thing that I'm probably most excited about,

00:05:17 ◼   ► on a practical basis, is the fingerprint reader on the 5S,

00:05:21 ◼   ► which is just useful.

00:05:23 ◼   ► It's one of those things that it solves

00:05:24 ◼   ► a really common annoyance in a really reasonable way.

00:05:31 ◼   ► Especially, I don't know, one of the things that drives me crazy is every time I buy anything

00:05:35 ◼   ► in the App Store, iTunes, whatever it is, you have to enter your Apple ID.

00:05:39 ◼   ► And so I find that I enter my Apple ID often probably once a day, on average at least.

00:05:45 ◼   ► And as a result, it's perhaps not the strongest password as it should be, which is a little

00:05:50 ◼   ► awkward because a lot of things are tied to my Apple ID and it's kind of an important

00:05:53 ◼   ► thing to me.

00:05:54 ◼   ► And so what I like now is that I can make those purchases with my fingerprint and still

00:06:00 ◼   ► then retain a very strong password for my Apple ID.

00:06:02 ◼   ► And I think that's going to be a big win for a security

00:06:05 ◼   ► perspective as well as usability perspective.

00:06:08 ◼   ► And being able to unlock it, that's useful.

00:06:10 ◼   ► But mostly I'm thinking about being

00:06:12 ◼   ► able to use that as a sense of identity

00:06:14 ◼   ► that I can associate with myself.

00:06:17 ◼   ► And it's funny.

00:06:18 ◼   ► I was reading the Hacker News thread about the event.

00:06:22 ◼   ► And it seemed like most people, they

00:06:23 ◼   ► were worried about that, oh, the NSA

00:06:25 ◼   ► is going to steal your fingerprints and all

00:06:27 ◼   ► this kind of thing.

00:06:28 ◼   ► which I suppose for some people is a concern.

00:06:32 ◼   ► For me, it's one of those things I've done government contracting, so the government

00:06:35 ◼   ► has my fingerprints.

00:06:36 ◼   ► I'm also an immigrant, they have my fingerprints.

00:06:38 ◼   ► I'm not too worried about it.

00:06:40 ◼   ► And so I think it's kind of an overblown concern.

00:06:45 ◼   ► The reality is, I think Apple is pretty honest when they say that they're keeping the data

00:06:49 ◼   ► locally and the reality is that data is something that is personal, but it's not sensitive,

00:06:55 ◼   ► I don't think, in a lot of ways.

00:06:58 ◼   ► Anyway, and then next thing I was going to talk briefly about is the switch to a 64-bit

00:07:02 ◼   ► processor for the 5S.

00:07:04 ◼   ► And I must certainly put out there that I'm no expert on exactly all this.

00:07:09 ◼   ► A lot of people who've gone through the 32-bit to the 64-bit transition on the Mac are probably

00:07:15 ◼   ► better able to speak to exactly the implications of this.

00:07:18 ◼   ► It seems like in a lot of ways, if you're structuring -- unless you're doing deep sort

00:07:23 ◼   ► of mathematical computations in a lot of things and you're structuring your application in

00:07:26 ◼   ► in a reasonable way, the impacts on you are going to be relatively light.

00:07:30 ◼   ► There's some -- because the change is much more low level than a lot of things will be

00:07:35 ◼   ► impacted by.

00:07:36 ◼   ► And the reality is it's just going forward, things should just be faster and better for

00:07:40 ◼   ► customers.

00:07:41 ◼   ► It's one of those changes where there's really no user-facing benefit to something being

00:07:46 ◼   ► 64-bit.

00:07:47 ◼   ► It's just faster and better for a lot of the sort of really, really low-level stuff that

00:07:52 ◼   ► I'm not even fully capable of talking about.

00:07:54 ◼   ► But so far, it seems pretty good at this point

00:07:57 ◼   ► that you can only try and read through the guide

00:08:00 ◼   ► for the 64-bit transition guide.

00:08:04 ◼   ► Make sure your apps are in line with what's going on there.

00:08:07 ◼   ► Do some basic testing.

00:08:08 ◼   ► But until you really have a 5S to try and play with,

00:08:11 ◼   ► you won't really know exactly if you

00:08:13 ◼   ► have any weird edge cases or places

00:08:14 ◼   ► where things are going to be problematic.

00:08:16 ◼   ► But so far, so good for my initial testing.

00:08:18 ◼   ► It doesn't seem like it's going to be a huge pain to update,

00:08:21 ◼   ► too, which is exciting.

00:08:23 ◼   ► And having that transition, a transition of that significance,

00:08:27 ◼   ► be this seamless, definitely means

00:08:28 ◼   ► that Apple is making really solid investments

00:08:31 ◼   ► in the tools and the capabilities

00:08:32 ◼   ► and the frameworks and the way they've structured things

00:08:35 ◼   ► to hide that a lot away from developers, which I definitely

00:08:38 ◼   ► am grateful for and commend them for doing that.

00:08:41 ◼   ► So anyway, so I'm going to talk a little bit about just

00:08:43 ◼   ► the actual process from here.

00:08:44 ◼   ► So the gold master was released, the SDK.

00:08:48 ◼   ► So if you were working on an update,

00:08:50 ◼   ► that's iOS 7 ready or only or anything like that,

00:08:53 ◼   ► it's now's the time to get that polished, submitted,

00:08:57 ◼   ► sent off to the App Store.

00:08:59 ◼   ► I believe they started accepting admissions to iTunes

00:09:02 ◼   ► late this afternoon.

00:09:03 ◼   ► I've already sort of submitted the initial runs of all

00:09:07 ◼   ► of the apps that I'm expecting to do iOS 7 updates for

00:09:11 ◼   ► in the hopes of for day one.

00:09:13 ◼   ► So day one is going to be a week from tomorrow.

00:09:16 ◼   ► So it's a week from Wednesday.

00:09:18 ◼   ► If you're listening to this on Wednesday, it's in one week.

00:09:21 ◼   ► And this is what they've done pretty much always before the iOS will launch.

00:09:25 ◼   ► The Wednesday before the iPhone launched, the iPhone will launch on that Friday.

00:09:28 ◼   ► It gives you kind of this nice little transition period where you can focus on your updates

00:09:31 ◼   ► right before there's new hardware and that kind of new rush.

00:09:35 ◼   ► And so, yeah, so I've submitted all those.

00:09:37 ◼   ► I took the risk or the gamble, I guess you could say, of doing just some basic smoke

00:09:43 ◼   ► testing, which is, I believe, an electronics term from what

00:09:47 ◼   ► you used to-- you'd build a circuit, you'd turn it on,

00:09:50 ◼   ► and you'd see if any smoke came out.

00:09:51 ◼   ► And if smoke didn't come out, if your circuit board didn't

00:09:54 ◼   ► explode, you didn't necessarily know if it worked 100%,

00:09:57 ◼   ► but you knew it wasn't on fire.

00:09:59 ◼   ► And so that's a lot of what I've done.

00:10:00 ◼   ► I've been doing extensive testing of the last release

00:10:02 ◼   ► candidates-- or not release candidates, the last betas.

00:10:05 ◼   ► But I got the GM seed, did some basic smoke testing,

00:10:09 ◼   ► and then submitted it to the app store to sort of get myself

00:10:11 ◼   ► in line.

00:10:12 ◼   ► And then I'll be spending the next few days going through

00:10:14 ◼   ► and doing very extensive testing on device

00:10:17 ◼   ► in lots of different places and doing all the really rigorous

00:10:20 ◼   ► testing that I would hope to do in the hopes of finding

00:10:22 ◼   ► something.

00:10:23 ◼   ► If I find something, I'll reject the binary and resubmit.

00:10:26 ◼   ► But my hope is that the testing I've done before

00:10:30 ◼   ► will help get me ready to a point

00:10:31 ◼   ► that that won't be the case.

00:10:33 ◼   ► I would have just been able to get in line really early on

00:10:36 ◼   ► so I can go through the review process and make sure I'm ready.

00:10:39 ◼   ► Or in worst case, if they find something, it gets rejected.

00:10:43 ◼   ► And then I have a chance of resubmitting in time

00:10:45 ◼   ► to still make it in.

00:10:47 ◼   ► So we'll see.

00:10:48 ◼   ► And then I guess where it goes from here.

00:10:49 ◼   ► It'll be kind of a fun kind of week.

00:10:51 ◼   ► It's a little bit sad that they're not

00:10:53 ◼   ► allowing pre-orders of the 5S.

00:10:54 ◼   ► So I'm likely going to be ending up sort of waiting in line

00:10:58 ◼   ► probably next Friday, which is a little awkward.

00:11:01 ◼   ► I feel like I'm a little too old to be sitting out

00:11:04 ◼   ► in a lawn chair at 3 in the morning outside of a Apple

00:11:07 ◼   ► store.

00:11:08 ◼   ► But we'll see.

00:11:10 ◼   ► I'm probably not going to get a 5C.

00:11:13 ◼   ► I was looking at it, and it seems like tech spec-wise,

00:11:15 ◼   ► it's almost exactly identical to a 5.

00:11:17 ◼   ► And so unless something comes out later when I fix it,

00:11:20 ◼   ► does a teardown, and it has vastly different memory

00:11:23 ◼   ► characteristics or something like that,

00:11:26 ◼   ► it seems like a 5 is going to be a pretty good example of it

00:11:30 ◼   ► for testing and compatibility reasons.

00:11:32 ◼   ► So I'll be getting a 5S, and it should be pretty good.

00:11:37 ◼   ► It's always exciting to have a new phone.

00:11:39 ◼   ► It's kind of one of these devices, I guess,

00:11:41 ◼   ► or the benefits of being app developers.

00:11:43 ◼   ► I feel like I can justify getting a new phone every year,

00:11:45 ◼   ► even if I'm off cycle and it's going

00:11:47 ◼   ► to be a little bit more expensive.

00:11:49 ◼   ► But anyway, so that's my first impressions.

00:11:51 ◼   ► Like I said, I'll probably have something a little later

00:11:52 ◼   ► in the week, maybe.

00:11:53 ◼   ► But otherwise, I'm just excited.

00:11:55 ◼   ► I think it was solid.

00:11:56 ◼   ► It's not surprising, and that's bad,

00:11:58 ◼   ► and that's not bad all at the same time.

00:12:01 ◼   ► Overall, I would say it met expectations.

00:12:03 ◼   ► If I was giving it a report card,

00:12:05 ◼   ► I would say that met expectations, and that's good.

00:12:08 ◼   ► It's not surprising in a bad way, it's not surprising in a good way.

00:12:10 ◼   ► It's just met expectations, and I'll just keep going.

00:12:13 ◼   ► It seems to be working so far.

00:12:14 ◼   ► All right, that's it for today's show.

00:12:16 ◼   ► As always, if you have questions, comments, concerns, or complaints, I'm on Twitter @_davidsmith,

00:12:20 ◼   ► david@developmentprospective.com.

00:12:21 ◼   ► Otherwise, if you have a great week, good luck with those updates.

00:12:25 ◼   ► Happy coding, and I will talk to you later.