The Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) APNSallows applications to notify their users of remote events. If the user has turned on Notifications from the Settings application, her device will maintain a persistent IP connection to the APNS. Only one connection is maintained and all third-party notifications are forwarded (by providers) through Apple’s own servers.
Figure 14.1. A push notification from a provider to a client application
One of the more useful (from a developer standpoint) features coming in iOS 4 (formerly iPhone OS 4) is the UIAutomation tool. This lets you run an automated set of tests against an application, and test to see if they had the expected results. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, there is minimal documentation for the tool, so here’s a quick walkthrough of how to use it.
To start, you need the iOS 4 SDK, which is available as of today from developer.apple.com. Next, you need to make sure that you have your application set up to be easily run by the UIAutomation suite. The main thing is to tag all your UI controls in Interface Builder with names, by setting the Accessability label to a unique value for the view.
Continue reading “How to use UIAutomation to create iPhone UI tests | by James Turner”
While there are a few examples available for connecting AIR applications to native operating system processes today, most of them are basic “Hello World” examples, or happen to be purely theoretical. I’ve only come across oneor tworeal world examples of applications that leverage this functionality in a meaningful way. In this article, I’m going to talk about the DropFolders application which uses AIR 2.0 NativeProcess APIs to make working with HandBrakea more streamlined, hands-off process.
Today, Apple has begun emailing iPhone app developers to let them know they’re now accepting iOS 4-compatible apps in the App Store. Just as it does each time before a new OS launches (such as earlier this year with the iPad OS, which was iPhone OS 3.2 — yes, it’s a little confusing), Apple wants to make sure it has apps to show off when the new OS hits on June 21 (three days before the iPhone 4 launch).
