Wednesday, March 5, 2008 @ 6:23 PM
The Long Awaited iPhone SDK
Tomorrow's the day. The day that developers over at Apple finally unveil their plans for third-party iPhone application development. Press members were invited to "join [Apple] to learn about the iPhone software roadmap, including the iPhone SDK and some exciting new enterprise features."
Words like "learn about" and "roadmap" don't quite encourage someone interested in having instant access to an SDK. Will tomorrow's event be filled with more talk, or actual tools? That's yet to be determined, but I have confidence that Apple will not disappoint. After all, they announced this event six months ago.
More than anything, I'm interested in finding out which programming language will be used to develop apps. It's been clear for sometime that Flash is not going to be the answer. In fact, even today, sites like AppleInsider posted interview snippets with Steve Jobs in which his stance on the plug-in is clear. The current desktop version of the Flash plug-in demands too much processing power to currently make sense on the iPhone and Flash Lite is a joke.
The bottom line is that the iPhone's version of Safari is slow, so more robust applications (including games) will need to be developed using a language that can access the phone's guts more directly and intelligently.
In answering a question about an iPhone blogging application, Jobs recommended that "if Apple does not address it" then the individual should learn Cocoa and write an iPhone blogger application himself.
Cocoa is Apple's name for the collection of frameworks, APIs and accompanying runtimes that make up the development layer of Mac OS X. Therefore, it would make sense that Cocoa also be used to develop apps for the iPhone since it runs a mobile version of Mac OS X. But, again, specifics won't be clear until tomorrow. Which is exactly when we'll post again with our impressions of the news that is announced!
P.S. Cocoa applications are mainly written in Objective-C.
// Ryan Jennings
Words like "learn about" and "roadmap" don't quite encourage someone interested in having instant access to an SDK. Will tomorrow's event be filled with more talk, or actual tools? That's yet to be determined, but I have confidence that Apple will not disappoint. After all, they announced this event six months ago.
More than anything, I'm interested in finding out which programming language will be used to develop apps. It's been clear for sometime that Flash is not going to be the answer. In fact, even today, sites like AppleInsider posted interview snippets with Steve Jobs in which his stance on the plug-in is clear. The current desktop version of the Flash plug-in demands too much processing power to currently make sense on the iPhone and Flash Lite is a joke.
The bottom line is that the iPhone's version of Safari is slow, so more robust applications (including games) will need to be developed using a language that can access the phone's guts more directly and intelligently.
In answering a question about an iPhone blogging application, Jobs recommended that "if Apple does not address it" then the individual should learn Cocoa and write an iPhone blogger application himself.
Cocoa is Apple's name for the collection of frameworks, APIs and accompanying runtimes that make up the development layer of Mac OS X. Therefore, it would make sense that Cocoa also be used to develop apps for the iPhone since it runs a mobile version of Mac OS X. But, again, specifics won't be clear until tomorrow. Which is exactly when we'll post again with our impressions of the news that is announced!
P.S. Cocoa applications are mainly written in Objective-C.
// Ryan Jennings
MindComet at 6:23 PM - View Post
