Apple SDK rocked my day!

Blogged on March 6, 2008 at 20:07

Today has been pretty hectic… My back has been killing me all day and Apple released the iPhone SDK which caused a huge stir around the web!

As to my back, I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know I’ve a small cyst right next to my spine, mid-back, for a while. Never felt it… until the last few days! And I can’t even blame the pain on the AWESOME chair I have at work… I’ll probably go to the chiropractor soon, but I’ll need to see a doctor eventually.

On to the news of the day: Apple (finally) released the SDK for the iPhone! It was a very exciting keynote, with Steve Jobs only introducing other people and not taking much part on it until the press Q&A at the end (could this be the start of a slow “backing off” by Jobs preparing his succession?). Among the great news and technical details about the SDK and upcoming apps for the iPhone, we were introduced to Apple’s “AppStore“. Basically this is no more than a mix between the iTunes Store but for applications with the current Installer.app for jailbroken phones. One of the things that got me excited were the apparent 3D capabilities of the iPhone, showcased with a few games (including a demo of the upcoming Spore) and the information that EA is already working on developing games for the iPhone (FIFA 08 with multi-touch+accelerometer ?? wow). And no, no jailbreaking/unlocking apps… or porn!

Then came the part most techies & developers have been speculating lately: the distribution model and its price. I think Apple is keen on creating the best development platform in the world. OSX has been proven to be just that and a lot of developers have invested time and resources into developing excellent apps for that platform. Apple is trying to do the same with iPhone and the latest rumours before today already pointed towards that, which got confirmed today during the SDK presentation when Scott Forstall, Apple’s VP for iPhone Software talked about how “Apple is a platform company” (something some of us already thought of but was never mentioned this clearly).

Considering this, developers wanting to sell/distribute their apps through AppStore (the only possible way anyway) will have to enter the iPhone Developer Program and paying for that $99. This price covers everything. I think the price is appropriate considering Apple is not charging hosting, distribution, etc… They only charge 30% of whatever you charge your customers. If you choose to freely distribute your app, Apple gets… yes, $0! Considering this, I think $99 is a fair fee to have access to Apple and having them check your app, host it, publicize it, etc…

But now comes something I only discovered in the midst of a Twitter discussion with Luis Rei and David Rodrigues. While I don’t agree with calling the $99 an “Apple Tax” I agree with the fact that it’s pretty bad that Apple doesn’t allow you to install your own personal, experimental apps on your OWN iPhone! While I understand the reason to do it (as it would open the way to code being shared and compiled with the freely available SDK, which would bypass Apple’s check and system!), I don’t like it! I was getting really motivated to learn Cocoa and Objective-C and start messing around with small apps and utilities but not having a way to test them on my own phone is sad.

But all said and done, the customer won’t mind any of this! As (free) apps will be available even through wi-fi and even EDGE, as a customer, I couldn’t be more delighted… Well, maybe I could… June??? Can I haz it now??? =)

Why Apple is releasing the iPhone third-party SDK by February ‘08!

Blogged on October 17, 2007 at 11:06

Apple announced earlier today they’ll be releasing a third-party SDK in February 2008. In my opinion this was planned all along and there are a few reasons why I believe this didn’t happen at launch, but they needed to “buy” time to get the whole infrastructure ready for the wave of development coming in.

I felt like the iPhone was somewhat “rushed out” and I can back that by saying that Apple has not accustomed us to announcing a product that was to be actually released over 6 months later. And the reason behind this being that they knew other competitors were investigating the same technologies, and Apple wanted to keep the “novel” factor

The other reason is the large infraestructure that has to be deployed both on the hardware and on Apple’s end, to ensure both security but also ease of use and of install of those new apps. After all, Apple just released their “Web Apps Collection” website a few days ago, something that should have been out all along.

The final reason is that they didn’t announce that iPhone apps were to be online web apps until later on. They did mention that it would be some closed format, etc… but only in June did Steve Jobs announce that their intentions for apps on the iPhone were webapps. I can’t agree with having a phone, or better, a portable define that is a *lot* more than just a phone, to not be able to include offline apps that are missing from the phone. An example pops to my head: my boss is switching back to a Blackberry (although he hates it now, after having used the iPhone!!!) because of the lack of a To-Do list app… In all honesty, he bought an iPod Touch to go along with it, but I believe other people discovered other things that were missing. I miss a password management app. I’d love to have Password Safe (Password Gorilla, on OSX) on my iPhone.

Another parallel thing is the whole “webapps paradigm”… I really like some webapps out there! Heck, I’ve been using more webapps lately, and the percentage is increasing. But I don’t feel so good about entering my passwords and personal data into a webapp, that’s hosted somewhere, susceptible of attacks and data mining, etc… This are very serious issues! And I’m not a “privacy freak”… I don’t care too much about having photos, mails, profiles, etc… around the web. But not personal stuff, like credit card information, secure passwords for home banking and such, etc…

And, oh boy, I can’t wait to get a SSH client working on my iPhone!!! Can we access the disk now, Apple?? And have some web development tools for quick hacks and fixes on my stuff?? Pleeeeeeeeeeease… ??