Apple iOS developers have been busy all summer working on the newest update to the iDevice software and it appears what could be the last beta version of iOS 5 has arrived. On Saturday, Apple released iOS 5 beta 5 with a variety of tweaks and changes for developers to work out before the iPhone 5 is released in September or October.
One of the big questions with iOS 5 is whether or not voice-powered functions from Nuance will be added before the new iPhone ships. So far, there has been nothing in the iOS 5 SDK that would lead developers to believe that it might be coming. The fixes and new functions in beta 5 do nothing to dispel that. 9to5 Mac has screen shots that it believes show voice-powered functions are on the way. Yet, there are a several new facets of beta 5 that developers will want to keep an eye on in the home stretch.
Boy Genius Report has the full change log if you would like to go check it out. Here are some highlights.
Accounts:
NEW: Enabling iCloud services in Setup Assistant may not always be saved correctly. After completing Setup Assistant you should visit Settings > iCloud to verify the state of the iCloud account. If you have multiple iCloud or MobileMe accounts configured on the device you should also visit each of those accounts in Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar to verify each account.
WebKit:
NEW: In beta 5, accessing sites that use client side SSL certificates does not work and may cause the application to crash.
NEW: URLs are now canonicalized by making the scheme all lowercase. If a fake URL is used to pass information from a UIWebView back to native code, make sure that the scheme is always lowercase, or that the native code compares the scheme in a case-insensitive manner.
It comes as no surprise that client side SSL certificates could cause applications to crash. Web developers struggle with SSL and they have been working on implementing it for years. Mobile developers can build on the backs of what the Web developers are working on but it is still difficult to institute SSL certificates.
After several months of working on the beta versions of iOS 5, what have developer reactions been? Is it difficult to implement? Have you tried beta 5? Does it seem like iOS 5 is ready to be released in a month? Let us know in the comments.
