Apple's iPhone SDK: one more thing, or one more sting?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 16 March 2008 19:27

Your IT - Mobility

Naturally, anyone who has successfully downloaded the iPhone SDK can use the iPhone simulator to test their iPhone software creations, although as Daring Fireball notes, there are still some restrictions such as the lack of Open GL access, Core Location services and the difficulty of testing the accelerometer with an onscreen device, something that is best tested with a real iPhone in hand.

But without developer status, access to any beta 2.0 firmware that could be loaded onto existing iPhone is denied, and so testing will have to remain on the iPhone simulator until Apple decides to further open the developer floodgates.

This will likely happen a lot closer to the iPhone 2.0 June release, as Apple strives to keep other secrets about the 2.0 firmware under wraps, or simply seeks to keep the beta 2.0 firmware off the p2p filesharing bittorrent networks.

Although Apple are being called the ultimate control freaks, so far Apple has done some amazing things with the iPhone, create a whole new class of touch interface, bringing multi-touch to reality, creating a stable smartphone environment that virtually anyone can use and learn in just a few minutes, and being totally upfront about wanting to ensure security is at the forefront of the iPhone experience.

Sure, we’d all love Apple to be much more open about things, and we’d love them to show users on a more regular basis that they are listening, but the fact we have an SDK at all along with new enterprise features shows they are listening, if only to some degree.

So, while the iPhone SDK may have contained a sting or two in terms of no multitasking, no sign of a true, native cut and paste and no sign of notes synchronisation, the promise of the SDK is vast, as is the future for the iPhone hardware, which, when Apple decides to upgrade it, should theoretically blow us away once again as did the iPhone the first time around.

If that second generation iPhone were to come in June, alongside the iPhone 2.0 firmware, in terms of a 3G iPhone with improved everything, it’d be one heck of a ‘one more thing’ we’d all long remember.