Question

iPhone OS 3.0 is being announced and previewed next week (March 17).

We all know the feature set users want. Copy/paste, MMS, Flash on iPhone, etc.

We’ll see about those.

What I’m interested in what does the development community feel the SDK is missing, in need of, to make programming for the platform easier and more productive.

Answer 1

• A more complete Interface Builder with support for custom palettes and all sorts of goodies like that.
• Better control over the keyboard.
• Better unit testing support. (Unit testing can be done, but only on the simulator, and it’s very awkward to set up.)
• Push notifications. Please.
• A more accurate simulator, i.e. one with a more accurate set of frameworks.
• The ability to easily build views like the Mail compose window.
• For that matter, an in-application compose window.
• A better way for apps to share data locally than by invoking URLs.
• Access to the calendar, notes, mail (possibly read-only), and bookmarks (again, read-only) databases. Maybe even limited access to the iPod database—even just the ability to read song metadata and access and change the playing song would be helpful.
• Some sort of middle ground between UILabel and UIWebView that allows for formatted text without a huge hassle.
• More built-in toolbar icons.
• The return of the ‘glass’ button style that was in the beta SDK.
• A few useful internal views, like UIProgressHUD, exposed.

And last but not least…

• A pony.