Last night Apple missed their fortnightly update to the iPhone OS 4.0 beta program. Apple has managed to hit this schedule for the past 2 months since the announcement of 4.0. Earlier yesterday I speculated around whether or not we would see an update:

“I wonder if Apple will hold back another beta for iPhone OS today and release at WWDC to intro new hardware APIs?”

I may be completely wrong on this one, but let’s look at the facts (ahem rumours). Apple are probably 95% going to launch the ‘iPhone HD’ or whatever they want to call it at WWDC next week. Based on the lovely Gizmodo leak, the device has a front facing camera. John Gruber has also speculated (and various rumours appear to confirm) that the device will also house a “HD” screen.

Both of those would require software/API changes to utilize. Firstly, the front facing camera would require an update to the iPhone UIImagePickerController API which currently enables applications to hook into the camera on the back to capture image and video. Somehow, Apple would need to change that so you can select which camera you want to use front or back – perhaps both?? Who knows?

Potentially though, Apple could release the new hardware without having the front facing camera accessible through developer APIs at this stage. It’s unlikely, but could happen.

In addition to this, the new ‘HD screen’ has the potential impact on 3rd party applications. Unknown yet is how Apple would scale up current standard definition applications for previous iPhone devices. They could use the iPad method of scaling up, however as a developer I’m really concerned by that approach, as in many cases it turns out pretty ugly.

More likely is XCode and Interface Builder are updated to support this new resolution, so you can rebuild your app’s UI. Perhaps going forward we will build to the new resolution, and the older phones will scale down? That’s certainly my preference…

Anyway, suffice to say with WWDC being 1 week away it seems logical that Apple would hold back any update to iPhone 4.0 beta until Monday 7th June. After all, there are potentially other software additions for the new device that go beyond just hardware that have the potential to have APIs. It would make sense to have all of that “available now”, as Jobs finishes his keynote.

More importantly though, let’s hope that ‘iPhone HD’ is available now.