iPhone Technology

Multi-Touch
With its large Multi-Touch display and innovative software, iPhone lets you control everything using only your fingers. How does it work? A panel underneath the display’s glass cover senses your touch using electrical fields. It then transmits that information to an LCD screen below it. The display also features an oil-resistant coating that keeps the iPhone screen clean.

Accelerometer

iPhone responds to motion using a built-in accelerometer. When you rotate iPhone from portrait to landscape, the accelerometer detects the movement and changes the display accordingly. The accelerometer also gives you amazing game control.

Sensors

When you lift iPhone to your ear, the proximity sensor immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent accidental dialing. The ambient light sensor in iPhone automatically brightens the display when you’re in sunlight or a bright room and dims it in darker places.

Accessories in iPhone

A way to connect:
Apps for iPhone and iPod touch can now communicate with accessories via the dock connector or wirelessly over Bluetooth.Enhance your accessory by developing an iPhone app to extend its functionality, or create entirely new integrated solutions that combine an iPhone app with dedicated hardware. For example, you can display a fully interactive Multi-Touch equalizer for your speaker system. Create an inventory app for your barcode reader. Or, build an app that logs and tracks the readings from an attached heart-rate monitor. The potential solutions are limitless.

Create your own protocol:
As with current Made for iPod accessories, your accessory can use Apple-provided protocols to control music and video playback in the iPod app. With iPhone SDK 3.0, you can also create your own custom protocols to exchange data and commands with your app. Use the new Accessory APIs to allow your app to communicate with and control your accessory.To learn how to add support for iPhone apps in your dock connector or Bluetooth accessory, join the Made for iPod and Works with iPhone Licensing Program and the iPhone Developer Program.

iPod Library Access

Audio content on tap:
With iPhone SDK 3.0, you can access a user’s music, podcasts and audio books from within your app. You can even leverage a user’s custom, On-The-Go, Genius and Smart playlists.For example, you could create a trivia game that uses the metadata of the user’s songs. Improve on an arcade game by using a playlist as its soundtrack, or add the ability to listen to podcast lectures in a note taking app. You can make almost any app more enjoyable by bringing a user’s personal music and audio choices into your app.


Take control:
Once you have access to the music and playlists, you have full control of the playback. You can play, pause, shuffle and repeat. While the user is listening to an audio track, you can follow where they are and even move to a specific part.

Playlists on-the-fly:
You can also build playlists using custom searches. Leveraging all of the metadata in the audio files, you can create custom playlists that match particular criteria. For example, if you want your app to play all of the podcasts from yesterday—you can build that from a search on Date Created and Content Type.

Peer to Peer Connectivity

One-on-one games:
Some games are just not the same when you’re playing against the computer—word games, chess and other strategy games are so much better when you’re playing against another person. You can now create games that are easy to set up and play between two devices, whether it’s an iPhone or an iPod touch.

Easily connect:
The new Game Kit framework opens new opportunities for developers to easily create peer-to-peer apps.Game Kit provides the user interface for initiating a multi-player game, and a data transfer API to share game state. When incorporated into a game, it will automatically discover if the same game is running on other nearby iPhones or iPod touches, allow the user to connect to one of them through Bluetooth, and start sharing game state over a standard IP-based communication channel. The automatic discovery is handled by Bonjour. And making the connection doesn’t require pairing, so it works seamlessly for everyone involved.

Not just for games:
While Game Kit has been designed for games, it can used for any kind of app to share information between iPhones and iPod touches. Use it to exchange business contacts. Share a photo with a friend. Or send a short note to someone nearby.

In game voice:
Game Kit also provides a real-time voice chat API. You provide the network connection, the in game voice capability provides the underlying services to capture your voice through the microphone, transmit it to another player and then playback their responses.

In App Purchase

Flexible payments:
In app purchase gives you the flexibility to support a variety of business models. You can offer your customers additional services and content within your paid app.For example, you can create a subscription magazine app where you ask for payment on a monthly, yearly or periodic basis of your choice. Sell extra levels to extend the experience of your game. Build a general-purpose city travel guide app and let your customers pick the city guides they want to purchase. This new capability opens up many new business opportunities.


You create the app, we'll bring the cash register:
The new Store Kit framework provides the functionality to process payments via the iTunes Store. You submit items to the store and set their price. When a customer chooses to purchase an item, your app creates a payment request and sends it to the iTunes Store for processing. After the iTunes Store verifies and approves the payment, your app is notified so that it can provide features or additional content.


Familiar business terms:
In app purchase uses the same business terms used for apps sold on the App Store. You receive 70% of the purchase price of each item you sell within your app, paid to you on a monthly basis—no credit card fees apply.

Apple Push Notification service

Apple Push Notification
Apple Push Notification service is to keep users up-to-date. This service will benefit a wide variety of applications. e.g., A sports application can now give key game updates even when the appication isn’t running. A chat application can display the latest response in a conversation. Task management applications can track how many tasks you have yet to approve.

Attention Getter
There are a number of ways to send a push notification. Send a message with text that lets the user launch your app. Trigger audible alerts with your own custom sounds. Add a numbered badge to your app icon when it’s important to let the user know how many things are waiting for them.

Optimization for mobile
The Apple Push Notification service is designed with the mobility needs of iPhone and iPod touch users in mind. Most of the heavy lifting is handled between your servers and ours, so there’s less impact on battery life and performance than there would be if you ran the app in the background. The service maintains a persistent IP connection so that it can notify users even when your app isn’t running. We’ve optimized the service to adapt to all different configurations of mobile networks that the iPhone runs on so you don’t have to.