iPhone OS 3.2 - oficjalny spis nowych funkcjonalności

Apple przedstawił deweloperom aplikacji funkcje oprogramowania iPhone OS 3.2. Oprogramowanie to nie będzie działać na urządzeniach iPhone i iPod touch, a wyłącznie na tabletach iPad.

Oto wybrane nowe funkcjonalności (ang.:)

Popovers
Popovers are floating views that reside above your application’s window and help you organize the contents of your user interface. Popovers help to eliminate the clutter that might occur in applications that need to display important controls or information in an unobtrusive way that does not distract from the main content.

The benefit of using a popover is that:

It appears only in response to specific user interactions and is dismissed automatically when the user taps outside of its bounds. This behavior makes the popover less obtrusive to the user.

It typically covers only a small portion of the screen and so does not obscure as much of the underlying content as a modal view might.

Split Views
The UISplitViewController class is a new container view controller that you use to manage two side-by-side content views. These content views are typically used to create a master-detail interface, whereby selecting an item in one view causes the other view to display detailed information about the selection. The views themselves are managed by view controllers that you provide.

The split view controller coordinates any interactions between your view controllers and the system. For example, when the user rotates the device, the split view controller rotates both view controllers together, forwarding any needed notifications to both of them.

Custom Input Views
Instances of the UIResponder class now support the ability to display custom input and accessory views when they become the first responder. Now, you can provide input views for any of your custom views and have them presented automatically by the system. (Previously, the keyboard was the only supported input view, and it was supported only by text view and text field objects.)

In addition to input views, you can also provide a custom accessory view to display above the input view. Accessory views are commonly used to provide additional buttons and controls when the keyboard is displayed. The explicit support now provided by responder objects makes it easy to animate your accessory views into position.

External Display Support
An iPad can be connected to an external display through a set of supported cables. When connected, the associated screen can be used by the application to display content. Information about the screen, including its supported resolutions, is accessible through the interfaces of the UIKit framework. You also use that framework to associate your application’s windows with one screen or another.

The UIScreen class provides support for retrieving screen objects for all available screens (including the device’s main screen). Each screen object contains information about the properties of the screen itself, including the dimensions that correctly take into account the size and pixel aspect ratio of the screen.

The UIScreenMode class provides information about one particular size and pixel aspect ratio setting of a screen.

Windows (represented by the UIWindow class) can now be assigned to a specific screen.

Gesture Recognizers
Gesture recognizers are objects that you attach to views and use to detect common types of gestures. After attaching it to your view, you tell it what action you want performed when the gesture occurs. The gesture recognizer object then tracks the raw events and applies the system-defined heuristics for what the given gesture should be. Prior to gesture recognizers, the process for detecting a gesture involved tracking the raw stream of touch events coming to your view and applying potentially complicated heuristics to determine whether the events represented the given gesture.

UIKit now includes a UIGestureRecognizer class that defines the basic behavior for all gesture recognizers. You can define your own custom gesture recognizer subclasses or use one of the system-supplied subclasses to handle any of the following standard gestures:

Tapping (any number of taps)

Pinching in and out (for zooming)

Panning or dragging

Swiping (in any direction)

Rotating (fingers moving in opposite directions)

Long presses

Improved Text Support
In iPhone OS 3.2, there is significant new support for text input and rendering. This support is provided for applications, such as word processors, that need more sophisticated text-handling capabilities.

File and Document Support
In iPhone OS 3.2, there is new support for exchanging and opening files. This support makes it easier to implement more document-centric applications, similar to what you might find on a desktop computer, while still maintaining a simplified interface for your users.

File-Sharing Support
Applications that want to share files with the user can now do so using the file-sharing support in iPhone OS 3.2. Here’s how it works:

It puts whatever files it wants to share in its Documents/Shared directory.

When the device is plugged into the user’s computer, a mount point is added to the system and the contents of any shared directories appear on the user’s desktop.

Users can modify the contents of this directory freely by copying files out, deleting files, or dragging new files in.

Applications that support file sharing should recognize when files have been added to the directory or removed and respond appropriately. For example, if the user added files to the directory, your iPad application might make those files available from its interface. You should never expect the user to go searching for files in this directory, nor should your application rely on any files being in this directory. It is strictly for sharing files with the user’s computer.