Technology news and Jobs 
Fuzzy Logic iPhone, oh iPhone: 17 days to HERO – or zero.
Fuzzy Logic iPhone, oh iPhone: 17 days to HERO – or zero. | iPhone, oh iPhone: 17 days to HERO – or zero. |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Tuesday, 12 June 2007 | |
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Page 1 of 2
Given all of Apple’s products are in some way intertwined, and given the focus of the WWDC is for developers who want to learn more about programming Mac OS X software, news of the iPhone wasn’t expected to be the focus of the WWDC keynote, although we were all expecting to hear something about the possibility of third party iPhone software development and the limits Apple might place on this. In addition to the keynote being primarily about the latest features of Mac OS X 10.5, many of which were unveiled at Macworld six months ago, Apple’s other big surprise was Safari being released for Windows XP and Vista, marking the second time that hell has frozen over at Apple, given that this was Jobs’ claim when he released iTunes for Windows back in 2003. Safari, the browser that also runs on the iPhone, and the browser in which Apple’s iPhone apps will run in. Yes, as we know, Steve Jobs finally announced there would officially be third party iPhone apps, but as they are Web 2.0 AJAX based apps with presumably limited access to all of the iPhone internals and features, developers' happiness at the prospect of being able to create third party iPhone apps has not been as radically overwhelming as everyone was at the launch of the iPhone itself. Apple, and select partners such as Google, are the only companies so far allowed to create iPhone apps using an iPhone SDK, or software development kit, which Apple’s developer community didn’t get access to yesterday. The ‘real’ iPhone SDK would allow deep level access into the iPhone’s internals, letting developers create ‘real’ applications. But for now, Web 2.0 apps, which will have access to making calls, sending emails, and positioning information for Google Maps, 'looking and feeling' like real iPhone apps, so Jobs says, with full touch control access and other unspecified capabilities, is what will have to be the environment developers use to create iPhone apps. Developers who probably aren’t web developers, but who will now have to learn how to program web applications. Naturally this has caused some grumbles with existing Mac OS X developers who use Apple’s Cocoa development environment to create Apple software. Given this is not available for the iPhone, existing Mac OS X applications can’t be easily modified to run on an iPhone with touch controls – they’ll need to be re-written to run through Safari. But a side benefit of iPhone apps being developed to run in Safari on the iPhone means they can run, likely with modification for a keyboard and mouse input system, on both Windows PCs and Macs, opening up third party iPhone apps to the biggest group of computer users there is: people running Windows XP and Vista, and those running Mac OS X. As with all Jobs has done over the past few years, it’s a bold and cunning strategy to boost Apple’s market share as never before. Apple has the iPhone, the phone that promises to outdo all others despite not having a better than 2 megapixel camera, not having 3G or 3.5G, not having removable memory, not having GPS and not having a keyboard. Jobs also has a new operating system that boasts better features than Windows Vista, and has released a browser that will rapidly boost user numbers on both the Mac and PC platform. Still, despite our excitement for Leopard and Safari, the iPhone is where it’s all at. Will it easy enough for my mother to use? Will the keyboard be the iPhone's Achilles heel as some naysayers predict? What's the iPhone's mission in life - and what dreary fate must the iPhone avoid? Please read onto the conclusion on page 2 for more... |
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