Background

I’ve become a lot more interested in WebGL lately, and remembered reading on Hacker News a while back that WebGL would be available in iOS 5 as part of the iAd framework.

WebGL will not be publicly available in iOS 5. It will only be available to iAd developers.

When iOS 5.0 went GM, I decided to knock up a quick WebGL demo to see what was involved & how well it performed.

Unfortunately it didn’t run at all — creating a webgl-experimental context via the canvas element’s getContext() API would fail.

There’s a lot of discussion going on at the moment about Apple’s App Store submission process and the role that carriers play in vetting applications. When the App Store was announced, I naïvely believed that Apple had successfully cut out the carrier middleman responsible for crippling every other mobile development platform. Unfortunately, the carrier protectionist oligopoly lives on, albeit on a slightly smaller scale.

With Google’s acquisition of Feedburner, I’ve been locked out of my Feedburner account. Since Google doesn’t seem to be providing any level of support for the relocation process, I’ve been forced to recreate my feeds. If you’re subscribed to the article feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/atnan) or comments feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/atnan-comments), you should point your feed reader to these new feed URLs:

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/atnan-articles
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/atnan-all-comments

Sorry for any inconvenience – I know I’ve found it a bit of a pain when other blogs have changed their feed URLs on me!

Those of you who are developing iPhone applications that utilise Apple’s Push Notification Service (APNS) will understand that sometimes it feels like a bit of a black hole. Fortunately, Matt Drance (Apple’s Application Frameworks Evangelist) has made a device configuration profile available which enables verbose logging in “apsd”, the daemon that runs on devices and is responsible for connecting to the APNS servers and retrieving push notifications.

This is a simple but useful tip for people like myself who want to stay up to date with the latest beta releases of the iPhone SDK, but who also rely on having a stable version of the SDK installed for things like deploying to the App Store, reproducing bugs from in-the-wild, or client work that doesn’t take advantage of any new SDK features.