Taking the iPhone 3.0 Plunge

I am making good use of my Apple developer membership and I am downloading the iPhone 3.0 Beta 3 SDK and OS beta for my iPhone 3G. All of the documentation says that you shouldn't put this beta release onto your daily use phone, so the first thing I am going to do when the download finishes is put it on my daily use phone. (I don't have a development phone yet, and dammit, I just can't wait any longer for cut/copy/paste.)

The main reason I am taking the plunge into the deep end of the iPhone pool is this video here:

iPhone 3.0 Demonstration

Its an hour long, but so chock full of gee-whiz stuff, that I just have to get it on my phone today! Hopefully I can convince my wife to be one of my "testers" so I can load it on her phone as well.

In the new SDK there is a CocoaTouch Map control, which I am going to see if I can write a "find your buddy" application leveraging this new control, and also see if it fits into the App I am currently working on.

I am going to document the trials and tribulations that I go through with this new endeavor, because that is what an exocortex is for.

Update 1, 28 April 2009 13:04

The downloads are finished - one full hour of downloading. The SDK is over 2 GB. the journey begins....*melodrama*

Update 2, 28 April 2009 14:34

Doing two things at once. I started the process of setting up my phone as a development device. I have generated a development certificate using the Keychain Access application on my machine, and I have uploaded this cert to the Apple Developer Portal. In order to provision your iPhone to be used as a development device, you need a 40 digit Hex number known as a Unique Device Identifier (UDID). This identifier is found by starting up Xcode, plugging in your iPhone, then opening the "Organizer" window (Window -> Organizer). This looks to be pretty close to a step-by-step set of instructions for device ID discovery:

Devices How To

I stopped here, though, because I am still running XCode with the 2.x SDK, so now I am installing the 3.0 SDK and then I will continue on with the provisioning. I have found no information that says I need to have the 3.0 SDK installed before I can provision and install OS 3.0, but I am a little paranoid so I am going this route anyways.

Update 3, 3 May 2009 11:37

After much reading and googling and pondering and waffling, I am now actually loading 3.0b4 onto my iPhone. It is, actually, alot easier than I thought. On the iPhone developer site is a link for iTunes 8.2, download and install that. It is slightly confusing because everything about the package (the readme, etc.) makes it seem like you are just installing 8.1.1, but doing iTunes > About iTunes confirms that it is in fact 8.2 beta. With iTunes open, plug in the iPhone and hold the Option (alt) key while clicking "Check for updates". This will bring up a finder dialog, find the OS 3.0 beta 4 package, click it and press Open on the dialog. Thats when the magic happens. Hopefully all goes well, it is still in the process of installing.

Update 4, 3 May 2009 12:16

So far so good, I have iPhone OS 3.0 beta 4 on the phone and it appears that everything except my contacts were preserved. Bit of a scare however. Once iTunes loaded 3.0 onto the phone, it gave me the dialog letting me know it needed to reboot the phone. The reboot hung and I really thought I had bricked the phone. After letting it sit for about 10 minutes, I disconnected the phone from iTunes, then plugged it back in. iTunes recognized my phone, so I was very relieved. Next, I Option-clicked Restore to bring up a finder dialog, and in the dialog selected the iPhone OS 3.0b4 package to "restore". I installed the OS and my phone came back to life, phew!! I am in the process of syncing my contacts back onto the phone, so I am not out of the woods yet.