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Apple releases iOS 5.1 beta for iPhone, iPod touch and iPads to developers

Published Nov 28th, 2011 6:42PM EST
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Apple just started seeding iOS 5.1 moments ago to iOS developers. The new build is available for the iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2, iPad and third and fourth-generation iPod touch devices. We’ll let you know if this new release further fixes battery life and if we find any other changes. Apple’s full change log for this release follows below.

Notes and Known Issues

The following issues relate to using the 5.1 SDK to develop code.

Accounts

When creating an iCloud account, you can use any Apple ID as long as it is a full email address and not a MobileMe account. If you have a MobileMe account, you can move that account to iCloud. You can find more information at: http://me.com/move

APIs

  • The NSNetService class and CFNetService APIs do not include P2P interfaces by default. To browse, register, or resolve services over P2P interfaces, an application needs to use the Bonjour DNSService*() APIs noted below.
  • Setting the interfaceIndex parameter to kDNSServiceInterfaceIndexAny in the following API’s will not include P2P interfaces by default. To include P2P interfaces, you must now set thekDNSServiceFlagsIncludeP2P flag when using kDNSServiceInterfaceIndexAny or set the interfaceIndex to kDNSServiceInterfaceIndexP2P. The affected APIs are:
    • DNSServiceBrowse
    • DNSServiceRegister
    • DNSServiceResolve
    • DNSServiceRegisterRecord
    • DNSServiceQueryRecord

GameKit

App Icons and Profile Photos are not loading in apps using Game Center.

iCloud Storage

  • Provisioning profiles must be enabled for iCloud in the iOS Provisioning Portal. You can enable a provisioning profile for iCloud by navigating to the App ID section of the iOS Provisioning Portal and configuring your App ID for iCloud. After enabling the App ID for iCloud, regenerate your provisioning profiles to enable them for iCloud.
  • The setSortDescriptors: method of NSMetadataQuery is not supported.
  • In iOS 5, files that are protected via Data Protection cannot be used with iCloud Storage APIs.
  • File names are case-insensitive in Mac OS X but case-sensitive in iOS. This can lead to problems when sharing files between the two using iCloud. You should take steps on iOS to avoid creating files whose names differ only by case.

Movie Player

Starting in iOS 5.0, in order to facilitate finer-grained playback control, a movie player is not automatically prepared to play upon creation. Call the prepareToPlay method to prepare the movie player. For more information, see MPMoviePlayerController Class Reference

Music Player

Using shake-to-shuffle causes Music app to freeze and playback to stop.

Newsstand

FIXED: Deleting an issue that was marked as the currently reading issue could cause a crash.

Security

In iOS 5, the signing of certificates with MD5 signatures is not supported. Please ensure that certificates use signature algorithms based on SHA1 or SHA2.

Xcode/Developer Tools

  • A bug in the documentation organizer causes an exception when you type in any field in the content area. To prevent the need to log in to the developer website from Xcode, download documentation sets locally using Xcode’s documentation preference pane and enable the ‘Check for and install updates automatically’ checkbox as a workaround.
  • “uninstall-devtools” script mistakenly removes files and packages even if Xcode is still running. Be sure to quit any running copy of Xcode before starting the “uninstall-devtools” script.
  • The Network Link Conditioner daemon cannot be launched after installing the Networking Link Conditioner without a reboot. You can manually workaround the issue with a restart or by the following command: sudo launchctl load /system/library/launchdaemons/com.apple.networklinkconditioner.plist.]
  • In the iOS 5 development tools, it is possible to extract APIs used by an application and have them checked for use of private APIs. This option is offered when you validate your application for app submission.
Jonathan S. Geller
Jonathan Geller Founder, President & Editor-in-chief

Jonathan S. Geller founded Boy Genius Report, now known as BGR, in 2006. It became the biggest mobile news destination in the world by the end of 2009, and BGR was acquired by leading digital media company PMC in April 2010.

Jonathan is President of BGR Media, LLC., and Editor-in-chief of the BGR website.

What started as a side project at the age of 16, quickly transpired into 24-hour days and nights of sharing exclusive and breaking news about the mobile communications industry. BGR now reaches up to 100 million readers a month through the website, syndication partners, and additional channels.