iPhone SDK thoughts

9 March 2008

I’m guessing that you, and everyone else in the world who would ever possibly end up reading here, have heard all about the iPhone SDK announcement on Thursday. It was pretty much what I expected, and also what I hoped for; I couldn’t see any way that we were going to get anything other then I proper SDK with proper tools, but also that Apple were going to be the gatekeepers on getting apps on iPhones. It could have been a whole bunch worse then it is, anyway, and the app store is going to be a revolution for any indie developer that’s struggled with marketing and order processing.

It was nice – and appropriate – to see EA showing some demos, as it’s obvious that casual games are going to be one of the largest sellers on the app store. With that large screen, accelerometers and decent 3D performance we could see something really special happen here I think. There’s an interesting article on Boing Boing Gadgets about exactly this topic which goes into it in far more detail then I ever could.

Also interesting – and much linked to – is Jason Fried’s post on 37signals on how the iPhone is now going to completely dominate the mobile market, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s the first mobile platform with a decent developer tool chain (Cocoa rocks, quite frankly) coupled with the best possible way of distributing applications to the consumer you could wish for.

Further mining the internet for posts on similar lines comes this one from former Apple man Jens Alfke on the beauty of 99¢ iPhone apps, and he’s totally right. Micropayments have been banded about so many times before and are now achivable – to a certain extent, depending on your definition of ‘micro’ – but only if you’re someone big who can afford the infrastructure. Apple is that big, and with the app store are opening up the possibility for all sorts of payment structures (can you say ‘episodic gaming’?).

To finish, all this talk of real applications doesn’t mean that the web apps previously touted by Apple as being the ‘solution’ are going to go away. This post by Jesper points out not only that the iPhone SDK emulator comes with a new version of WebKit that supports client side storage and CSS transforms/animations but that it also supports a full screen mode. Those chaps at Apple have been awfully busy…

From: Articles

9 March 2008