Operating System of iPhone - iOS Gets Divided into Four Different Layers

An obvious trend in the field of communication - iPhone - has got its distinctive operating system which is known as iOS. The os has been split into four layers in order that iPhone applications developers can take utmost benefit of the unit. The layers are: Cocoa Touch Layer (upper layer), Media Layer, Core Services Layer and Core OS Layer (deepest layer). To be well-versed with all of these layers is of paramount significance for iPhone app developers. We are going to have a cursory look at initial two layers.

 The very first layer - Cocoa Touch - is also called upper layer and is significant for iPhone. This layer provides necessary frameworks that offer the infrastructure iPhone app developer is required to implement on applications. The most used frameworks are the UIKit framework, Foundation Framework, Core Foundation Framework etc. As a way to present graphical user interface, iPhone application developers need to use UIKit in the course of iPhone app development. The Foundation framework is required to communicate with the Core Foundation Framework in the lower Core Services Layer, which is made up of all the various other accessible development features.

 Media layer should be invoked when the application needs multimedia services. This particular layer has lots of graphics, audio as well as video technologies that help iPhone apps developers create special applications which are appealing and enjoyable. The Core Graphics framework has the interfaces for the Quartz 2D drawing API. Quartz is the same advanced, vector-based drawing engine which is used in Mac OS X. It facilitates path-based drawing, anti-aliased rendering, gradients, images, colors, coordinate-space transformations, and also PDF document creation, display, and also parsing. Inspite of the fact that the API is C based, it applies object-based abstractions. It is useful to stand for fundamental drawing objects, so that it is easier to store and reuse graphics content.

 The Quartz Core framework consists of the Core Animation interfaces that is an advanced animation as well as compositing technology that utilizes an optimized rendering way to implement complex animations and visual effects. It possesses a high-level, Objective-C interface for configuring animations and effects which are then rendered in hardware for functionality. There are lots of sections of iPhone Operating system, such as UIKit classes for example UIView into which Core Animation is built-in. It gives animations for many standard system actions.

 The companies providing iPhone apps development in India use the Objective-C interface in this framework to build custom animations. In order to supply the users together with an extraordinary audio experience, iPhone Operating system includes sharp audio technologies. The technologies enable developers create applications that can play back or record high-quality audio and activate the vibration feature on products that enable those functionalities. The audio technologies enable audio formats like AAC, Apple Lossless (ALAC), a-law, HE-ACC (MPEG-4 High Efficiency ACC), iLBC(Internet Low Bitrate Codec), MP3(MPEG-1 audio layer 3), IMA/ADPCM (IMA4), Linear PCM.

 The os of iPhone facilitates full-screen video playback by Media Player framework. This framework helps the playback of movie files with the .mov, .mp4, .m4v, and .3gp filename extensions. Following compression standards widely-used to help playback of movie files:

 -- H.264 Baseline Profile Level 3.0 video, up to 640 x 480 at 30 fps. Observe that B frames are not supported within the Baseline profile

 Thus, iPhone app development is an enhancing experience for those developers who understand these four layers, their properties and their operating inside the entire scheme of the development.