From Steve’s Mouth
March 6th, 2008So, the day has come. Today, developers learn what the next step is on the road to developing applications for the iPhone and iPod touch.
We’re eager to find out what awaits us in the weeks and months to come. Will anybody get to develop apps, or only Apple-approved developers? Will the apps be sold independently or via iTunes? Is it really Cocoa? These are questions that we hope to have clarified today, although at the Tuesday shareholder meeting Steve did drop some heavy hints:
Jobs […] noted that the iPhone SDK would enable third parties to address the subject of iPhone blogging “if Apple does not address it.” Jobs then recommended that he learn Cocoa and write an iPhone blogger app himself.
Learn Cocoa and write an iPhone blog-editing app? I’ll get right on that!
March 6th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Dear cocoa-dev list … How do I write a blog-editing app for the iPhone in Cocoa? ;-)
March 6th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Idiots need not apply.
March 6th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
It feels like Scott just said “these are not the droids you’re looking for.” I mean, he’s demoing Xcode and such, but at this point I can’t believe that “the same SDK we use” can be true. There’s just no way that the carriers will allow arbitrary network access on the cell network.
March 6th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Ah, there are the “bandwidth hog,” “porn,” “malicious,” “privacy,” etc. terms. Oh, and a special $99 developer program fee. I guess the $500 Select fee isn’t enough?
March 7th, 2008 at 11:02 am
I think the SDK announcement went pretty well yesterday. It seems like pretty much everyone (devs and enterprise folks) got what they wanted.
I’ve got to admit, I don’t think I’d buy MarsEdit mobile (I do have the current version). It has nothing to do with MarsEdit, but more of the fact that with a tiny keyboard and an inability to screenshot/edit pictures I’m not sure it would be functional enough for my needs. I’d imagine you’d be able to snap a picture with the camera, select the picture, maybe crop it, add it to a post, type some text, and send it off. That functionality WOULD be attractive to some people though. Heck, I might have just convinced myself it would be useful for certain types of blog. Maybe I need to rethink my statement about MarsEdit mobile.
“Build it and they will come!”
March 8th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
What about Black Ink or Clarion? These could be really useful for iPhone. Games, I think will be a big hit on the platform, and I can imagine education and music applications selling well too.
I think developers in general will need to carefully think about what types of applications work best. I’m excited.
March 12th, 2008 at 9:47 am
The only product I offer that might work well with the iPhone is my transcription application. I imagine a voice recorder app that links back to Transcriva. Since any voice recorder application should work fine, there’s really no need for me to develop anything since this is sure to be done a thousand different ways in the first week (along-side to-do and recipe apps, of course :-)).
With this in mind, what Geoff said can be extended by saying we need to think carefully about what types of applications others might build that work best with our own as well. It’s always a marketing boon to say, “Works with the iPhone”, even if they need to download a free utility or even an inexpensive third-party app to enable this interoperability. Many would gladly do so to extend the reach and range of their favorite apps.
March 14th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Unfortunately, not everybody gets to play at first. I’m guessing I’m not the only one to receive notice from Apple today that I didn’t make the first round of chosen iPhone developers. Guess I’m stuck on Aspen for a while yet.
March 14th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Jeff: If it makes you feel any better, I’m also still on the waiting list. As are a at least a few more established companies than mine, that I know of.
March 14th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Actually, it does make me feel quite a bit better. Thanks. :)
I have to think if they’re giving preferential treatment, you’d be one of the earlier developers – certainly earlier than someone like me (I’ve been away from Cocoa development for eighteen months doing *shudder* Java integration work).
Maybe it was just a “thank you, we’ve received your application” e-mail that was poorly written.
Frankly, right now, I just want to be able to run the darn apps I’m hacking out on an actual iPhone, try out the accelerometer, see what I can do with the camera… find the limits of the hardware support through the official SDK. Y’know… play.
March 21st, 2008 at 1:22 am
It’s kinda stunning just how overwhelmed the Apple iPhone Dev Center appears to be. From the amount of chatter I’ve seen on third-party sites, it appears that there was just as much interest in the Android SDK release as the iPhone release and yet…the developer.apple.com site appears much less ready to handle the traffic.
The key difference is that the iPhone is already shipping and Apple is allowing some developers to actually install apps on real iPhone devices, whereas Android still appears to be in the unofficial-halfbakery stage with a random assortment of linux-based devices running around.