Mac Daddy World

???????? At WWDC, there’s always the guy with the hat. Just sayin’.

See you at WWDC, hat guy!

From Apple’s pre-WWDC mailer today:

Confidential Information
With the exception of the Keynote, all information presented or provided to you by Apple during WWDC is considered Apple Confidential Information, the unauthorized disclosure of which is strictly prohibited. Please ensure that your communications with others outside WWDC, including your blogs, do not contain any Apple Confidential Information.

Shhh, don’t tell anyone what you learned in “Safari and WebKit Overview” session. It’s a secret! “Getting Started With OpenGL”? Sorry, can’t help. Maybe Apple will make that information available via iTunes U some time in mid-November.

See you at the conference!

furniture BulgariaI haven’t even downloaded the SDK yet, but many of my questions can be answered from simply reading the documentation and license agreement.

1) How does File System access work?

From the FAQ:

How do I write information locally?
You can write to your application’s local storage area.


From the Agreement:

An Application may write data on a device only to the Application’s designated container area, except as otherwise specified by Apple.


??????So each application is sand-boxed. You cannot modify data from another application; for example, to edit the Notepad database, access iTunes media, etc.

2) What is Apple’s policy on using undocumented frameworks, classes or functions?

The SDK is great, but us developers have already reverse engineered the iPhone and know the iPhone OS inside and out. Can we still use routines we know about?

From the Agreement:

Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs.
??????

You are only allowed to do what is specified in the SDK manual. Anything else is completely off limits. Imagine if they had this rule on the Mac, just how stable things would be

3) How picky will Apple be about UI design?

From the Agreement:
Applications must comply with the Human Interface Guidelines and other Documentation provided by Apple.


We are sorry to inform you that your app has been declined for inclusion in the App Store. Reason: Your app scored a 4.3 for Aesthetic Integrity. An Aesthetic Integrity score of 5 or higher is required. Please try again later.

4) What’s the problem with having to get your apps approved by Apple?

You have to play by their rules. Kind of takes some of the fun out of it.

Abstract:

Use your iPhone’s camera as a wireless Mac webcam! Stream video over Wi-Fi to any Mac video application such as iChat, Photo Booth or Skype.

Some History:

After the C4 Iron Coder contest where we made the video conferencing iPhone app, we put down our iPhones and got back to writing Mac software for the rest of year. Nobody knew, and we still don’t know, what the future of these iPhone apps would and will hold.

Last week I had a strange urge to get back on the iPhone again and solve some problems that had left us stumped this summer. More specifically, I wanted to get streaming video from the camera. (If you remember our video demo at C4, the frame rate was quite low. This was because, under the strict time limit of the conferece, we weren’t able to grab from the camera any faster than a frame or two per second.)

Meet iPhoneCam:

Click to download a recording of an iChat video conference where I demo it to Glen.

I figured it out: Now we can stream at up to 30 fps. My proof-of-concept is an iPhone app which streams video over Wi-Fi to a video driver component on the Mac. This way, you can use the iPhone’s camera stream in any Mac video program like iChat, Photo Booth or Skype.

Using iChatUSBCam (so that iChat can see non-iSight video sources), I did a video conference with Glen to show him how it looks. He recorded it with Conference Recorder so that we could share it on the blog. You can download a demo video here.

But I haven’t gotten to the clever bit yet.

The Clever Bit:

The iPhone app and the Mac component find each other using Bonjour (zeroconf). There’s absolutely no configuration necessary. If there’s an iPhone-based camera available, the Mac finds it and uses it automatically. Glen had the idea to see if Bonjour could be used, and we noticed that IDMResearch had already provided a nice wrapper around CFNetService.

FAA: (Frequently Answered Answers)

A: No, it only streams video.

A: No, it’s only for Mac users.

A: iPhoneCam is not yet available to download. We’ll have something for folks to try soon. Stop by our booth at MacWorld Expo and maybe we can give you a live demo!

The whole Ecamm team is going to be exhibiting at MacWorld ‘08. If you’re going to be at MacWorld, be sure to come by the booth and meet Glen, Midori, and myself. If you’re not going to MacWorld, consider it! This is the Mac enthusiast’s event of the year.

We’re doing a really fun promotion all week: Stop by at any time during the expo and instantly win cool prizes. Prizes include iPod Shuffles and completely free copies of our (not usually free) software. So come and win a copy of DockStar, iGlasses, iPhoneDrive, CardRaider, or if you’re lucky, an iPod!

We’ll also be demoing our software, showing off our iMage cameras, giving a sneak peak at the very new, improved and the never-before seen Huckleberry 3.

We’ll also have various iPhones and iTouches available, showing off some cool new iPhone hacks we’re working on, and for anyone who wants to see a demo of our other iPhone projects.