This week, we are resuming daily builds, something we know is important to your mobile app development workflow.
We have a lot of new things we’re planning to push out in coming days but we’re also focused on simple omissions like ‘native.newVideo()’ support for Android which was added in daily build 2013.1203.
One annoyance on Android that we’re investigating is the fact that images are decompressed in the Java VM, which places some unnecessary memory pressure on older Android devices. We think we found a way to get rid of this limitation bypassing the Java VM whenever possible.
iOS 7
Yesterday, Apple announced the release date for iOS 7, so I’m sure iOS 7 support is top of mind for a lot of you. Now that everything’s been announced, we’re no longer under NDA, so let me explain what we’re planning to do.
First, in terms of getting your apps to work on iOS 7, you can use the last public release and things should work fine. When we tested the public release, we also tested it against the iOS 7 Betas, and found everything looks to be in working order.
Now, one thing that we realized is confusing is that in the build dialog, you can select the iOS SDK. By default, “6.1″ is selected. This just means that when your app is loaded on a device running iOS 7, the device will assume your app was built using iOS 6 behaviors. This is important because Apple has made a few breaking changes in iOS 7. To avoid problems associated with iOS 7 behaviors, you should continue to build against 6.1.
In the mean time, we’re working on fixing these behavioral changes introduced in iOS 7. For example, if you try to change the status bar, you’ll notice things don’t behave like you expect. That’s because Apple change the behavior of the underlying iOS APIs between iOS 6 and iOS 7. Once we workaround these, then we’ll make iOS 7 the default SDK in the build dialog.
If you’re a daily build user, we give you the option of choosing “iOS 7 Beta” in the build dialog. This lets you preview how your app will run using iOS 7 behaviors. In essence, you get to see whether things work the same or something breaks.
iOS 7 and Widgets
One other thing we’re working on is offering an iOS 7 theme for the widget library. Mostly this is going to be a drop in. There were a few minor tweaks to widgets that we needed to add like some animation on the On/Off switch, but this will give you the option of making your app look like an iOS 7 app, even if it’s running on iOS 6!
Graphics 2.0
Last week, in addition to releasing a public release, we also released Developer Preview 2 (Alpha 2) of our next-generation graphics engine.
The next public release is going to be based off this new engine. It will feature a 1.0 compatibility mode that should make it very easy for you to run existing projects on the new engine. Our strategy here mimics Apple’s when it transitioned from Mac OS 8 to Mac OS X. Namely, we tried to make things 95% backward compatible. That means, most of the time, you won’t have to make any code changes. In some rarer cases, you will have to make a few changes, but the API has remained remarkably stable between the 1.0 and 2.0 engines.
Overall, the feedback has been positive from our alpha testers. In terms of when graphics 2.0 moves out of the private alpha and into public beta, it all hinges on getting graphics 2.0 into daily builds. We think of this as a major cross-over point. It means we’ll be replacing the 1.0 graphics engine with our cutting-edge 2.0 graphics engine so everyone (well, subscribers) can start doing some amazing things!