Apple releases new Mac OS X 10.5.5, iPhone 2.1 seeds

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 31 July 2008 14:23

Business IT - Technology

Apple has released a second seed of the iPhone 2.1 firmware to selected developers, and the first developer release of Mac OS X 10.5.5 is imminent. The new builds will allow developers to test their existing applications against the new system software, and to start work on projects to take advantage of any new OS features.

According to MacRumors, the new iPhone 2.1 beta is primarily about fixing bugs in the first developer release. However, it also provides "an early implementation of the Apple Push Notification Service API."

The Push Notification Service was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Apple will maintain a persistent IP connection to iPhones (over the mobile network or Wi-Fi) to forward notifications received from third-party servers.

The notifications can take the form of badges, sounds or text.

The idea is that instead of leaving applications running in the background and polling for events (which is not supported by Apple's APIs, purportedly because of the effect on battery life), it's up to the server to push the event out to the iPhone via the Apple Push Notification Service.

So an instant messaging service could push a badge to an iPhone to show that a new message was waiting. The user would then activate the IM client, read the new message(s), reply, and then leave the client secure in the knowledge that a fresh notification will appear when there's another message to read.

Some people have expressed concern that this potentially gives Apple an unacceptable level of insight about what individual owners are doing with their iPhones.

What about Mac OS X 10.5.5? See page 2.