[ In a previous post we looked at some of the capabilities of Siri, Apple's intelligent personal assistant. Now let's venture a little deeper into how integration with third-party services might work. I have to point something out that should be obvious: I have no inside knowledge of Apple's product plans. This note is purely based [...]
Apple’s Siri personal assistant was one of the main advertised features of the iPhone 4S. It is a marriage of speaker-indepent voice-recognition technology and domain-aware AI. What sets it apart is how it’s integrated with back-end and on-device services and how it maintains context across multiple requests so it feels like you’re having a conversation [...]
Before: After: I’m not an antenna engineer but it seems like the simplest solution would be to move the ‘gap’ between the two antennae where it’s unlikely to be covered through casual touch. This would work for both left and right-handed users. From a hand-placement point-of-view the ideal spot would be in the middle of [...]
It’s time, once again, for the annual love-fest that is WWDC and that starts next week. I’ve been to each one since the iPhone launch (I know, that makes me a relative newbie) but having spent a good chunk of the past two decades living in San Francisco, I figured I’d combine tech-tips for first-time [...]
[ This ended up being a fairly long and somewhat technical post. I edited it down as best I could, but I think it's an important topic in the iPhone world and something that has to be laid out in its entirety. I suspect it won't be of much interest unless you're an iPhone app [...]
I agree with most everything Karl Adam says about the limitations of the Apple Push Notification Service, especially the problem with its failure to stack notifications so they’re not missed. I posted a bug report a while back (rdar://7054632) offering a simple solution to get around this particular problem: save each incoming push payload into [...]
Popping up a modal dialog on the iPhone is a fairly straightforward process: modalDialogViewController *modalController = [[modalDialogViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"modalDialogView" bundle:nil]; [self presentModalViewController:modalController animated:YES]; [modalController release]; Dismissing it then is a simple matter of the modalController invoking: [self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES]; But what if you want to show only half a page’s worth or maybe you need the [...]
Word came today that Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference is going to be running from June 8-12 2009 in San Francisco. Since Apple’s no longer going to be participating in MacWorld this is one of the few public conferences where Apple and its partners can make public product announcements. So now’s a good time to start [...]
One of the loudest complaints about the iPhone AppStore has been the lack of support for eval or demo applications. In the desktop world users can often download an application and use it for a period of time before deciding whether it’s worth paying for. But in the iPhone AppStore universe (where all transactions occur) [...]
Idea vs. Execution Raven Zachary in a post on the O’Reilly Inside iPhone Blog raises the old idea vs. execution argument. *Sigh*. This is the same debate I’ve been hearing (and having) for the past twenty years and it keeps popping back up again. Folks, it’s not zero-sum / either-or. It’s both. One hand holding [...]