The second beta of iPhone OS 4.0 was released earlier tonight and after reading the first reports of it being buggier than the first beta I thought it worth a go. After all, doesn’t fortune favour the brave?
Federico Viticci at macstories.net reported how this beta contains some major bugs, especially relating to imaging; that the camera and screenshots don’t save to the iPhones Camera Roll. I can confirm that this bug exists and although you can take pictures and screenshots it seems you are unable to access them from anywhere on the device. I can also confirm that simply taking a picture using the camera causes the camera application to freeze. Needless to say, I’m surprised that these big oversights could get through the Apple QA process, but there it is.
Apparently there are a wealth of bugfixes from the first beta but I haven’t noticed any yet. Some bugs, like the Photo application and Settings screens showing no items are still there in Beta 2 however the user interface does have some nice new animations so I cannot help but wonder if these “Beta” releases should really be instead called ‘Developer Previews’ rather than Beta releases.
I’m currently looking through the huge list of changes to the API just to see if there’s anything I need to relearn. Since I’m currently targeting OS 3.0 I don’t think there’s a great deal to get up to speed on other than to make sure my apps preserve their state using the new APIs and not just the old ones.
