Apples iOS 5 was released on Thursday the 13th October, which coincided with XCode 4.2 coming out of Beta, and being made available as the baseline developer version....
So what does this mean ?
For Users, you can right now upgrade to iOS5 using iTunes, HOWEVER make sure to BACK EVERYTHING UP before doing this.
Installation of iOS5 will essentially wipe your device, so unless you have backed up your purchases, settings, songs, movies, books, and other data using iTunes, YOU WILL LOSE IT !!!!
So far I have only seen a small number of apps that do not work properly with iOS5.
These broken apps tend to be ones where the developer has used custom GUI widgets to try and get around some of the GUI shortcomings of the touch environment. (Things like Option boxes as used in HTML, which there is no GUI equivalent on iOS).
So be prepared for a couple of apps to stop working properly when you upgrade to iOS5
For Developers
If you want to develop and test your app on iOS5 devices, your are going to need Code 4.2.
If you are a Monotouch developer like me, you would have noticed MonoDevelop 2.8 being pushed around a week ago as an upgrade.
And if you were not up to the latest cutting edge announcements from Xamarin regarding this update, you probably just upgraded (Like myself) without worrying about what else was required.
Finally, like myself, you went to add new GUI elements, and noticed things were broken.
After a frantic search on Google, and trying many many different things, I realised that I needed to upgrade to XCode 4.x
Roughly 4Gbs of downloads later, things were still not right for me.
After a complete re-install, and noticing daily updates from Xamarin, MonoDevelop / Monotouch finally became a stable environment on Friday, after installing the latest Monodevelop 2.8, monotouch, and XCode 4.2.
Developers Verdict
I didnt think iOS 5 was going to be released sooo soon, so I am glad that I did the upgrade.
If you are using standardised GUI for your app, then you will not have a problem with iOS5.
There are a couple of new widgets available now, (Such as numeric value increment / decrement arrows), and XCode 4 is completely different to XCode 3.x (especially how Delegates and Actions are now wired up), but once you get used to it, it is a huge improvement.
