iPhone Developer Reaction
January 10th, 2007The . message . from . developers . is . clear. We want to develop for it. And in our realm, that is the sincerest form of flattery.
Many of us also want to use it. And quickly. If Apple were to open the device up for development, it would also have the effect of establishing a large beta testing pool consisting of perhaps the market’s most critical users, before going prime-time in June. As I understand the FCC regulations, Apple can rent us unapproved devices for development purposes, much as they did with the Intel transition kits. Please? Pretty please, with sugar on top?
In other news, Eric Albert has confirmed that the iPhone is the project he’s been laboring away madly at for the past several months. Major kudos to Eric for a job (apparently) very well done. You might remember Eric as one of the people who brought us the Intel Mac. As far as I’m concerned, Eric should be golden-handcuffed to his desk. Apple, don’t let anybody recruit him away!
On a lighter note, I noticed that Dan Wood was among the developers griping about the iPhone SDK situation. You may remember Dan as the unlucky developer whose two major products have been eclipsed to varying degrees by Apple’s in-house products.
Clearly, if we want an SDK from Apple for the iPhone, we just have to convince Dan Wood to develop one first!
Update: This post was featured today in Technorati’s Buzz TV. Nice to see one of my quotations slickly animated in video format!
January 10th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Bring out the sacrificial Dan!
January 10th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
It seems that the Intel transition offers a lesson here.
When Intel was officially announced, Apple made sure that developers could start working on prerelease hardware immediately, well in advance of Intel Macs being publicly available. They had to, if they wanted developers to be anything like up to speed when the Intel Macs first came out.
So where’s the iPhone developer kit, eh?
The iPhone appears to have been announced with a much shorter lead time than the Intel transition, and so far the developer support is squat. At best one might say that Apple doesn’t expect third-party developers to be participating when the iPhone debuts. If we’re lucky we might get something later on, but I’m thinking if we don’t have some kind of official developer support soon, we’re not likely to get it at all.
January 10th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
I really do think that they will allow third party widget support, and even indi widget support. thats the most i could expect though. Thats also the least i expect: the widgets seem slightly removed, perhaps DashCode will have some special formatting for this.
January 10th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
by removed i mean, different (like a cousin once removed)
January 11th, 2007 at 1:19 am
I think the odds of an SDK before version 1.0 are approximately 0%.
I’d guess the odds of ever getting an SDK are no better than 50/50. And if it does come, plan on waiting at least a year.
There are no 3rd party apps on the iPod. I’m not sure why anyone thinks the iPhone is going to be any different.
January 14th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
As much as I’d like love to get my hands on an iPhone before the official release date, couldn’t Apple provide developers with an SDK and a iPhone emulator? Developers could get started right away and upload their apps to a real iPhone as part of the final QA process. Using an emulator would also speed up the development process, as you wouldn’t need to sync your app with a real iPhone each and every time you recompile.
I’d love to see some kind of Widget support, even if only signed Widgets could use Cocoa to make external API calls and connect to the network. While you can can do allot with <canvas>, AJAX and HTML, being able to run full screen would be a significant advantage. Some kind of local Widget storage, as in Flash, would be a big plus.
That being said, Apple is known for keeping new APIs private until they become reasonably stable. I’d be very (pleasantly) surprised if we see any kind of SDK before the next major iPhone release – if at all.