While all this was going on, of course there was some big news on June 7, when Steve Jobs introduced yet another Apple engineering marvel: iPhone 4.  Bundled with new features like front-facing camera, superior rear camera, dual mikes for increased noise cancellation, eye-popping Retina Display, multitasking, 720p HD video recording and even a new kind of gyroscope technology, iPhone 4 is a huge evolutionary step in smartphone design.  As the tag line says: “This changes everything.  Again.”  And, marketing hyperbole aside, as far as day-to-day use is concerned for sure this will change the way we use iPhone.

Before this year’s launch, several leaked – or mislaid – iPhone 4 models made the rounds of the major tech blogs, complete with gory dissections and the standard tsunami of specu-babble.  But there was one stealth feature all the teardowns and pundits failed to even guess at: the gyroscope.  And on our side, as veteran iPhone developers, when Steve Jobs announced this during WWDC we were all pretty excited.  And while it still hasn’t gotten much attention in the press, this feature is a game changer in iPhone’s rivalry with Android and Symbian devices.

Apple’s been pioneering smartphone innovations since iPhone’s introduction in 2007 with many widely imitated micro-technologies, in particular the accelerometer.  The accelerometer is a type of sensor that detects changes in a device’s orientation, vibration, rotation or fall by detecting linear acceleration along one of the three X, Y and Z axes – that is: up/down, right/left, and front/back.

3-axis accelerometers enable features we by now take for granted in smartphones (and lately, too, in non-Apple branded consumer digital cameras, music players, and gaming peripherals).  For example, landscape/portrait orientation shifting, tilt for directional control in games and applications, and shake features for refreshing a webpage or shuffling a playlist.  The 1st generation of accelerometer – pre iPhone 4 – could measure only linear motion; it couldn’t sense direction on a compass or twisting motions or rotation, nor had any notion of gravity.

Then last year Apple added a magnetometer to the iPhone 3Gs, enabling it to sense magnetized direction relative to the Earth’s poles. And now, with the introduction of the gyro in iPhone 4, Apple once more ups the ante in spatial detection / orientation with a new sensor for detecting 3-axis angular acceleration around the X,Y and Z axes, enabling far more precise virtualization of pitch, yaw and roll on iPhone.

While detection of change in velocity has been possible for some time thanks to conventional accelerometer calculations in terms of linear acceleration, the gyroscope has been designed to detect angular acceleration, which will detect change in both velocity and direction at the same time.  iPhone 4’s gyroscope enables the sensing of even slight degrees of rotation while simultaneously rejecting linear movements and hand jitters – both still ably handled by accelerometer’s linear movement detection technology.

Combining the 3 axes of the gyroscope along with the 3 axes of the accelerometer now enables iPhone to recognize distance, speed and direction as it moves real-time through space. And thanks to the CoreMotion APIs in iOS, developers with the vision to make use of gyroscope data can access it freely, as some have already done.

Of course iPhone 4 already includes gyroscope support, but it’s a safe bet the gyro will be baked into future versions of iPod touch, and naturally, iPad.  iPhone devs who can make use of this amazing new technology will find opportunities aplenty on the new platforms, especially games producers and developers.

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update:  Death Star or iPhone gyroscope?   iFixit has the goods.

That Screen

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Good iPhone app development aims for a stripped down UI due to the quick-to-clutter, pocket-
sized screen canvas. Rather than creating screenfuls of switches and check boxes, iPhone developers have typically built layers of menus, creating a vertical hierarchy of sometimes branching, confusing commands. While this has been the norm on iPhone, this is anathema to good iPad development.

The big deal on iPad is the big screen. This, combined with iPad’s new UI features, allows developers to offer on-screen controls much like a traditional Mac or Windows application.

Navigation Bars, Popovers, and the Edit Menu

iPhone developers coming to iPad will soon realize they can utilize the top navigation bar as a fixed toolbar, much like traditional, non-mobile applications. Thanks to iPad’s generous screen space, the top navigation bar / toolbar offers enough button space for the main controls that

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users have come to rely on in traditional applications, especially in landscape mode. Whether word processing or editing images, users should be able to work on a single screen for an entire session, just like on a regular computer.

On iPhone, users often jump back and forth to reach essential off-screen options and functions, but on iPad contextual controls are introduced not by forcing the user away from content, but instead with nav bars, edit boxes and popovers that allow users to linger on the main screen as they edit.

New Challenges
Application development for iPhone has been an utterly novel experience, with thousands of worldwide developers slowly coming to terms with multi-touch UI principles for a pocketable device. Now with iPad, Apple is challenging us once more to create the first generation of powerful, full-spec’d applications for full-sized multi-touch. If we do this right, the notion of iPad as somehow being derivative will quickly vanish as the platform comes into its own.

[source Mashable]

[source Edward Benson Blog]

[source MobileOrchard]