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iPhone SDK Beta 4 Now Available, Comes with OpenGL ES 3D Graphics Support

The latest iPhone SDK is now available, and unlike last time, it actually comes with an awesome new feature: OpenGL ES support! Now the iPhone simulator can render OpenGL ES that "mirror behavior on the iPhone and iPod Touch." The ES in OpenGL ES stands for embedded systems, and is the official graphics API in both Symbian and Android as well. As a side note, Open GL ES 2.0 is also supported by the PS3 as "an official graphics API" according to Wikipedia, in case you're playing the world's nerdiest game of Trivial Pursuit. [iPhone]

11:37 PM on Wed Apr 23 2008
By Jason Chen
9,000 views
38 comments

Comments

  • Here we go again some more iphone news. yes we know how awesome and great this phone is and even though it can't send any mms it still kicks ass and yes we know that once the june update hits It will be even better. Please enough about how this is the greatest phone ever. Enough already ;)

  • Image of Buran Buran at 12:09 AM on 04/24/08 *

    @Azteck: Um... this is a gadget blog... and will the people who constantly bitch about MMS give it a rest and email photos instead or buy another phone or jailbreak and install an MMS app, and stop bitching? Not every phone out there does it, you know.

  • I still dont find MMS to be such a big deal but say what you will.

  • what does it mean for an end user like me?

  • if they could talk about something other then the icrap phone.

    It came out almost a year ago.. i dont see any other phone get as much attention as this thing does... and its not even that great

  • Thanks for the update. It's nice just to hear about changes and the news - I'm not in iPhone forums.

    Naysayers, as said, say what you will. I like the hack, I like the tinker, and moreover I can't stand to use any other phone now.

  • @nitefire77: That's because MOST other phones are released, and that's it. You'd be lucky to even get a software update to fix bugs.

  • Couldn't aggree more. Can't stand to use any other phone now

  • @Playstation: It means that game developers and others wanting to code for the iPod Touch/iPhone but haven't yet been approved by Apple to test the application on the device-which is most-can now test it in the simulator. All that translates into more apps with OpenGL usage being ready when v2.0 is released.

    @nitefire77: You're right, no other phone gets this much attention. But no other phone releases so many feature updates. And no other consumer phone has an SDK with so many updates coming out or possibilities for so many apps.

    There is Android, which isn't on any phone yet, but Giz will surely announce any major changes to the SDK just as they announce new features and pics of WinMobile 6.1.

  • It means you'll soon be able to get from apple, what you've been getting by other means

  • people who make the effort to bitch about too much apple coverage in the comments sections of the apple articles are utter jackasses

  • My idea! I swear they took my idea!

  • @Leonard Nimrod: Heard of the Symbian OS?....never mind

  • It means more DS/GBA/PSP quality games for the iPhone will be released sooner, as opposed to cellphone quality games. Very good news.

    As for Symbian OS, the problem is that's designed to run on so many different phone setups, many of which are crappy wimpy phones with tiny low-res screens, that few good games can ever come out for it. iPhone you've got one single platform to develop for, just like DS or PSP, and that platform has a nice high-res screen, lots of RAM, 3D accelerator chip, multi-touch screen, and built-in motion controls. Only real problem is the lack of gaming controls (d-pad, buttons).

  • Also realize, anything to do with the iPhone SDK also pertains to the iPod Touch, so this is good news to owners of that as well.

  • that is pretty cool. I would love to try it sometime but I don't have an iPhone...

  • @Dreamwriter:

    Only bad part about us Touch users is we have to pay out for any major releases.

  • @TheGeektoriousBIG:

    But I can live with that.

  • @nikeplr and all others.

    Allow me to explain a bit. Lets say my mother, who is totally not tech-savvy has heard about the iPhone. She has no idea what Symbian or lets say a Nokia N95 is.

    Call it good marketing, a good product, brand awareness.. whatever you want.

    End of the line is that more people are interested in new features of the iPhone, then there are people interested in new features of Symbian. And a site like gizmodo stands or falls with the amount of hits it gets to an article.

  • iPhone/iPod Touch SDK? Please, give me a break! I'm sick of it!

    Few weeks ago, I saw an iPod Touch of my friend. I was really excited to use it, and dreaming of making some programs on it. Then that night, I came to developer.apple.com. To download the SDK, I have to fill in 3 or 4 forms of registration. After 20 mins of filling, the link appeared. I quickly grab it, and download...

    Hell! It was more than 1GB!!! And further more, it's only for MacOS user, and I'm using Windows. And guess what next? I MUST PAY $99 of "Membership fee" in order to loading my program on iPhone/iPod Touch!

    After that night, I realized somethings. Apple is our new Galactic Empire, and our new evil genius emperor is Darth Jobs!

  • What happened to the post about the pillow alarm? Last night I checked gizmodo and this was the 2nd story on the front page with the pillow alarm being first.

  • @Azteck: If you're sick of iPhone news now, wait until late summer / early fall when all the iPhone/iPod Touch apps start rolling in from this SDK.

    It's going to be great to see what people do with this.

  • The iPhone SDK will be a watershed event in short history of the iPhone. The amount of innovation and creativity will be something to behold!

    [www.budcase.com]

  • having used the iPhone sdk since it came out, I had been very pleased with its features. However, things have changed for the worse when I just downloaded this. Xcode is seriously misbehaving with a project I created with the previous beta - once opened, whenever I click any menu, I get an exception. I haven't fiddled with it much yet so cannot figure out the problem. Might be incompatabilities with the user defaults.

    But more importantly for me, Interface Builder has regressed. It no longer supports Image kit nor PDF kit (for Cocoa, not Cocoa Touch) in the library so I cannot edit a xib file I just created yesterday! I hope to be able to restore the Interface Builder plugins from my backups.

    will post an update when I've tried out more things

    I have the latest leopard update on an intel MacBook

  • @Azteck: "Roar, roar, roar. No undertstands you She-Bear."

  • @shadow_judge: No fricken way! Apple made you fill out a form to register as developer? How outrageous!

    And then you say that it was over 1GB to download the entire SDK for Mac OS X and Mobile OS X Even though .Net is quite a bit larger? Again, how dare they!

    And you continue with your complaint that an SDK for OS X and Mobile OS X is made to run on OS X. What! What! What! It's not like .Net is only built to run on Wind... Oh, never mind.

  • Why are people who are sick of a certain type of news always clicking on that news and then commenting on that news instead of passing over that news?

  • Image of Buran Buran at 11:33 AM on 04/24/08 *

    @Leonard Nimrod: I'd like to see the mods start banning everyone who comes in just to bitch that MMS/IM/some-feature is missing.

  • @shadow_judge: cry me a river.

  • @Buran: Are you referring to the adherents of the British lifestyle movement of the '60s, or the Norwegian art-rock group of the '80s?

    (Props to the Wikipedia disambiguation page.)

  • Image of Kaiser-Machead Kaiser-Machead at 02:07 PM on 04/24/08 *

    @Azteck: @nitefire77:

    Weepin' Jebus, you people never quit. The iPhone news has actually been a bit scarce lately, and still a few pundits from the peanut gallery come out to heckle, even if this is significant news for users out there, which is actually quite a lot.

    @shadow_judge: OMMFGDG THAT SUX! I wonder if you're actually being sarcastic.

  • Image of ANoel ANoel at 03:00 PM on 04/24/08 *

    I have been guilty of iPhone bashing, and I am sorry. I really am.
    I didn't realize the error of my ways until I saw the Touch and got it.
    Now, I wait for news like this, and I only rant if the greedy bastards at Apple want to charge me for upgrades I feel entitled to...



  • @Playstation: this means that your going to see a lot of games being developed for the iPhone, just like how EA is going to port Spore on to the iPhone.

  • Now that I've had more of a chance to play around with Interface Builder, I've realised that the plugins that I had previously said were unsupported are in fact supported as such - as long as you add them manually from preferences. Which is annoying, because you have to know which frameworks they live in. I don't know if they are part of the SDK or simply the standard OS X frameworks, but they seem to live under /System/Library/Frameworks/

    The plugins that my upgrade from beta 3 to beta 4 forgot were:
    Image Kit, PDF Kit, Address Book Browser, Open Scripting Kit, Disc Recording Kit, Automator Kit and Quartz Composer.

    That's quite a lot to suddenly lose and have to manually find the paths for.

    Still no idea what's going on with Xcode, unfortunately.

  • @shadow_judge: i don't know how many apps i'd want developed by a "developer" who can't read this simple sentence :

    "Technical Requirement: Intel processor-based Mac running Mac OS X Leopard"

    if you aren't smart enough to wrap your mind around that brain-teaser... you probably should stay away from application development entirely.

  • @shadow_judge: Oh, what do you mean I can't port my crappy windows-esque apps to Mobile OSX? I have to learn Obj-C? I can write them in java, can't I? NO.

  • All I know is:
    A) I still can't test my program on the iPhone. Which sucks because it uses the Core Location service and I kinda need to test the accuracy radius with cell tower only and the "energy saving" mode I came up with to keep the app running.
    B) My interface builder has shit the bed and I can't go back to my previous build where everything was proper

  • its a friggin telephone, people! STOP WORSHIPING IT!

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