iPhone SDK? (pt2)

There have been many postings around the net of Mac developers grumbling about the lack of Apple support for a true iPhone SDK, but there are a number of issues here….

The problem with a phone or indeed any device that manages your personal information is restricting access to that information and the overall phone OS as a whole. I think a full iPhone SDK will happen, but in the 5 months since the unveiling there was going to be no way on earth that Apple could get this thing to market, get a full SDK and a sandboxed environment to run it all in….. If you wanted that perhaps you would have preferred Leopard to be stalled until October 08?

Steve Jobs already mentioned that he’s not a big fan of Java on phones, and as a Java developer of 8 yrs, I’m afraid I have to agree with him. Many J2ME applications, including some games, are teetering on the very edge of mediocrity, and this isn’t just Java’s fault – lack of screen resolution, differing models and of course the networks disabling features of the phones and what they allow on their networks in the form of IP sockets, all contribute to the stranglehold that is mobile application development. And it isn’t just Java – the mobile Windows guys suffer the same issues.

By using a web server you can piggy back your application over Wi-Fi and GPRS without having to worry too much about the carrier restrtictions.

Also there has to be some form of SDK for the Safari based app development otherwise we won;t know how to link it into the phone features, and I suspect that when a full Obj-C SDK come out, a primary focus will be in the Safari plugins, that the web-apps can then integrate with.

Also the update issue does to soe extent go away as you don’t have to install a full mobile application (at whatever the data transit cost your carrier charges you, and at some god-awful speed) the application can be delivered much quicker to the user.

~ by calum on June 12, 2007.