I’ve been looking at the new version of iOS, trying to figure out what it means for Wandle’s apps. There’s only so much that I can say publicly at the moment, since the details are still covered by a Non-Disclosure Agreement, but I think enough of the “interesting” bits were shown at the keynote that it’s worth jotting some notes.
iOS5, launched last year, was big. You’ll probably remember the Notification Center and the Twitter integration. But there were also lots of neat new technical things “under the hood” that I was keen to use as soon as possible. So much so that I re-wrote www.cut using them and Rootn Tootn is iOS5-only too. (For various technical reasons that I won’t bore you with, I didn’t extensively update Yummy in the same way.) iOS6 is not like that. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of nice improvements, but little that I feel the need to integrate right now.
“Little” is, of course, not “nothing.” There is one part of Yummy and www.cut that is third party software, is not terribly reliable and is really difficult to keep up with technically. That’s the Facebook integration. As you may have heard, iOS6 has Facebook built-in. So what I plan to do is remove the Facebook API and just use the one included in iOS.
The good news: it should work much better, it will be more reliable and you’ll no longer need to log in separately.
The bad news: unless you’re using iOS6 you will lose this functionality.
As far as I can tell (looking at the crash reports) there are very few people who won’t be able to run iOS6. The main “victims” will be owners of the original iPad. If it’s any consolation, that includes me…
