With the introduction of the new iOS 4 (and the shiny iPhone 4’s), Carrot certainly hasn’t been lacking in ideas for new apps. Likewise we’ve been getting plenty of requests and ideas coming our way from clients. Everyone wants their apps to be iOS4 ready, but not many know what that actually means. The most hype we’re seeing is dealing with iAds and multitasking, so let’s take a quick look at this new hotness.

Firstly, iAds. There are two sides to this awesome Apple foundation. There’s the app side and the ad side. The ad side is where the meat and potatoes are; these are the companies that are investing their time and money to make interactive HTML5 advertisements. App side is the plate that displays the garnished ads, and Apple made this process deceptively easy – in just a few minutes iAd support can be added to almost any app. With Carrot’s web and mobile experience we’re in a prime position for working with both sides of this delicious meal.

The new feature that people get a little stuck on is multitasking. iOS4 does support this, but to a limited extent. Apps can’t run willy-nilly doing whatever they want, whenever they want – there are strict limitations in place for multitasking. Let’s break it down; there are 4 “types” of multitasking for apps:

Audio: Music apps, like Pandora, can stream audio.
Location: GPS apps, like TomTom, can give directions.
VoIP: Phone apps, like Skype, can continue the call.
Backgrounding: Everything else.

Audio, location, and VoIP can leave an application running as long as the audio is playing, their location is needed, or they are making a call. There is no time limit on how long an app can be running in the background with these settings, but that’s all they should be doing.

The fourth way to keep an app running, “backgrounding”, is limited. We can do a lot of things, but only for a short amount of time. By default it’s around 10 minutes, but the phone can still close the app forcefully if it needs the memory. The only interaction we can have with the user during this time is push notifications. It’s mostly to allow the phone to finish what it’s doing before getting closed permanently.

For the most part, when you see that a basic app has become “Multitask Ready” it usually just means they set it up so it saves data in different states before closing. That way when the app opens again that data is ready to go, taking less time to reach the point you were at before you closed it. Granted, it’s all a little more complicated than that, involving different states an app can be in (active, suspended, in the background, and terminated), but that’s a quick look at the options.

The good news is that Apple lets us schedule push notifications locally from an app. Now we don’t need to register with Apple’s push notification service depending on the type of tasks we want to accomplish. These local notifications are a great way to remind users when apps are closed. Say if we wanted them to put in a specific set of numbers every 108 minutes, we can schedule a notification to happen 108 minutes after they enter the numbers to remind them to do it again. The downside to this method is they need to open the app in the first place.

Get all that? I know, it was a lot. By now you must be bursting with app ideas, so share them with me on Twitter @antrants. Better yet, if you’re in Brooklyn, drop by Carrot Creative and grab a beer with me. I know a great little place with free wifi where we can romance about the new iPhone.

This article is copyright © 2010 

Crasher Squirrel: LOL

Lady Gaga’s Telephone video: WTF

Carrot Creative’s Halloween Costume: Geeky

Buzzfeed has been featuring snapshots of the viral web in realtime on their popular website since 2006.  They highlight the kind of things you’d want to pass along to your friends; obscure subcultures breaking into the mainstream, outrageous videos or ordinary guys having their 15-minutes of fame.

Now, thanks to Carrot Creative’s mad development skills, Buzzfeed has taken their content mobile!  The BuzzFeed iPhone app is the best way to stay up to date with the latest viral videos, images, links, and buzz while on the go. The app features the BuzzFeed.com front page, most popular posts, as well as LOL, WTF, OMG, Cute, Geeky, Trashy and Viral Feeds. The app is available FOR FREE at the iTunes App Store.

‘Cause let’s be honest, when you’re waiting for the bus to take you across town, wouldn’t it be great to browse great viral content like OK Go’s new video?

This article is copyright © 2010 

Application Interaction

• There will be no more application-to-user notifications. Meaning the small notification box in the bottom right of the bar on Facebook will no longer go-off when you are notified by an application.
• All correspondence between applications and users will be moved to either:
  • Email
  •  The Stream (the Facebook Wall)
  • The New Application Dashboard
• Application Invites and requests will be moved (read: buried) to the Inbox, under an Applications section.
• Application News Feed Items will be moved (read: buried) to the new Application Dashboard that shows users 3 sections:
  • Your recent activity among applications
  • Your friends recent application activity
  • Listing of friends and applications they have recently used
  • http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/images/0/03/Games-dashboard-annotated.png
• The Application Dashboard will have a little counter that you can increment as alerts, however it doesn’t seem to be an effective alternative to Notifications.

Profile Integration

• There will no longer be “boxes” on profiles.
• There will no longer be “extended profile info” on profiles.
• There will no longer be Profile Sidebar Items.
• All application branding on Profiles / Pages will live as a “Tab.”
• The new width of Profile “Tabs” will be 520px which is down from the 760 pixels as it currently stands.

Odds & Ends

• A lot of the older posting to newsfeed API calls have been deprecated and replaced with new ones.
• Applications will have the ability to prompt user access to their email addresses to send them info/notifications.
• Most of these changes are coming down the pipeline with no clear timeline, but on the upside:

• They usually give 30-60 days before they get rid of something.
• They usually stage a new feature for ~ 30 days before they push them live.
• They’ve added an “Add Bookmark” button for adding your applications to the bottom bar on Facebook easier.
• They’ve made improvements to the native analytics for applications a.k.a “Insights.”

Gamechangers
The Open Graph API will allow any page on the Web to have all the features of a Facebook Page. Once implemented, developers can include a number of Facebook Widgets, like the Fan Box, or leverage any API, which enable the transformation of any Web page so it functions similar to a Facebook Page. This has enormous implications on the way people consume brands with Facebook. It’s essentially having a brand’s Facebook page be their actual web-page.

In the end what Facebook’s team has done seems to be two fold. On one hand, developers will now have less effective tools than they once had to spread their applications but on the other hand, I believe we will begin to see truly creative and effective applications rise to the top.  Check out the Facebook Developers Roadmap for more information.

This article is copyright © 2010