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iPhone SDK May Be 1-3 Weeks Late
tuxeater123 writes "According to a blog posting at BusinessWeek.com, the iPhone SDK could be pushed back by another 1-3 weeks. Unfortunately, the evidence provided, such as the media announcements that are usually made before most Apple releases, suggests that this may indeed be true. Apple usually sticks to their announced deadlines, however they have been known to break them occasionally."
to make sure no one can create an alternative version of iTunes with it.
I'm devastated by this. It makes my entire life valueless. How could a company like Apple even think about delaying a software release by almost a month. Oh, woe, woe is me. etc etc etc
Slashdot article summaries usually are shock full of valuable comment, however they have been known to be totally pointless.
1-3 weeks late? So, I guess it is going to come out last year?
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
My big problem with this is that EVERY program for the iPhone has to come from iTunes, which means it will most likely be sold. I doubt Apple is going to host any freeware programs that people write out of the goodness of their hearts. I've actually been very surprised by the quality and ingenuity of some of the programs written for jailbroken iPhones, and I know that these programs will only increase in quality once real tools are released, but I just wonder how hindered it will be because of the inability of people to "just install" programs on it that they like.
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
What kind of /. user would buy a locked-down phone anyway?
The Bad News is the delay, obviously.
The Good News is no one but the tiny Apple fanatic crowd cares. With Apple being forced to slash their quarterly shipments of iPhones from 2 million down to 1 million the question of whether Apple has another iPod or Apple TV on their hands has been answered.
One of the most frustrating parts of being a mac and Apple platform developer has always been being the veil of secrecy around API's, and for anyone who's used to the mac development lifestyle, the iPhone SDK isn't an exception. Personally, I can't understand it; keeping customers in the dark may be smart marketing, but keeping developers for your platform in the dark is suicide.
Thousands of developers are already writing code for Google's Android platform because Google released the API early, even before they released a device. By the time Apple releases their SDK, Google will already be ahead of them in the numbers of developers experienced with their API. I wish Apple could understand the enormous competitive disadvantage they are putting themselves in.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
They managed to break records with a phone that lacked many features people have come to accept as standard, with a horrible choice of plans/carriers at a premium price.
Nobody at all seemed to care about the lack of 3rd party apps on it when they handed over their cash for the device. They broke into the cellphone market with just 1 product in record time and you say they got the disadvantage?
Android may do even better BUT it will do in a totally different way. First off there will be NO google phone. Android is closer to Symbian or even MS Mobile OS (whatever they renamed it to this month) then the iPhone. With the iPhone you bought a Apple product, with Android you will buy a phone from any number of phone makers that just happens to run a software suit in which Google had a hand in the development.
Their most likely won't be a google branded phone and none of the others have enough status to sell a phone just because their logo is on it.
Android and the iPhone are completly different products and Apple doesn't need to worry about the same things Google has too. I might buy an Android phone for its openess, but I think absolutly nobody bought an iPhone for any similar concerns. It would be like saying that Ferrari needs to publish the specs for their new car early so 3rd parties can develop roof racks and child seats for it early. Sorry, Ferrari and the people who buy them could care less about that.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Is that there are other platforms, indeed there are much larger platforms, and Apple is putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage by being all locked down with their APIs.
In the case of mobile smart phones, Windows Mobile and Symbian are the major competitors (and both are much larger in terms of market share). Windows Mobile uses Microsoft's standard development tools, and has no special restrictions on software, there's lots of free stuff you can get your hands on. I don't know as much about Symbian, but a simple web search shows plenty of freeware, an IDE for Eclipse developed by Nokia (one of the owners of Symbian, and major users of the OS) and so on.
I'll be able to get real work done for an extra 1-3 weeks before I starting hacking my phone.
Even that I am not a Java fanboy I moved mobile development over to JavaME and I think it is the only way to go. The (Smart)phone market moves so quickly - you don't know what platform you need next and with JavaME at least porting to a new platform won't be a pain in the arse.
Martin
Do you have any idea exactly what a classic Ferrari goes for, a car with no ABS, no traction control, no airbags, no radio etc etc etc? Yes it probably does have windshield wipers, I give you that.
In fact for these kind of car nuts the LACK of these features is the attraction.
different markets, why do people find that so hard to accept? Android and the iPhone are designed for different customers.
Do you really think that anybody at Ferrari or any of their customers CARE that you can't go into the local carshop and buy decals for it?
The iPhone simply didn't launch like that, it was shiny, it was Apple and that is why it sold so well. You might as well talk about how hard to upgrade the Apple Mini is. Sorry, nobody buys it to upgrade it.
In the meantime we got two products that have NOTHING in common (iPhone is a phone, android a platform) of which one sold millions and the other sold NOTHING yet. Lets wait a bit and see what happens when the first Android phone actually arrives shall we? Then we can make any kind of judgement on what will be the biggest success, but remember, specialist car makers making cars that do not offer any of the 3rd party extra's and ease of use of bigger makers are still around making a profit.
Not everything has to be same grey goo aimed at the largest market share. If Android outsells the iPhone a hundred to one, Apple still had a huge success.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
With installable applications, Microsoft or Amazon or eMusic or whoever can create a player for the iPhone and iPod that connects to their store, completely circumventing Apple iTunes and the iTunes store.
You can bet that that's what Apple wants to prevent; that's why they want to control what applications do and do not go on the iPhone. All this bullshit about "security" is just a smokescreen.
I don't like the hardware I own to be controlled by some other entity like any good slashdotter, but the cell phone market is a little different than traditional computers. I'm watching Android very closely, and I hope it lives up to the hype. But needing a phone NOW and looking at the smart-phone landscape (s well as the plain old phone landscape), the iPhone is so insanely better to use than anything else out there that it is a no brainer. I've tried mobile web on co-worker's phones, and it's a joke compared to mobile safari. So putting my idealism aside I got the phone that actually made my life better. And after 6 cell phones, it's the first one that doesn't piss me off.
The one thing that I think Android needs (from looking at the video demos) is the whole pinch zoom feature. I suspect that will be tough to get legitimately. It makes the iPhone usable with such a small screen. And after using an iPhone and watching the android videos it seems lie a glaring omission.
Frankly as a small time developer of largely worthless code, I wouldn't have a problem tossing apple a few dollars to host my application.
Sheldon
If you can't install self-signed apps on your own phone, then wouldn't that make it GPL-incompatible regardless of what Apple charges free-as-in-beer developers?
Just wondering. I'd like to write a personal app, but I'm not willing to pay big bucks for the SDK just for that purpose.
I think the Dashboard model is going to be followed here with the iPhone. Just like FrontRow brought on AppleTV, iPhone's been derived from Dashboard.
Downloadable from inside the device from anywhere, initiated via web page if desired, but with signed high quality apps available from Apple for a price.
I doubt Apple will want to get involved with signing free or near free apps from random developers. Seems like a lot of work with some failure inevitable.
Does anyone else think the 'SDK' is just going to be a build option in DashCode?
The security question is not a red herring. I have witnesses a phone virus and the results are not pretty.
A good friend of mine lives in the Philippines, where expensive cellphones are status symbols. In 1996, when I was paying her a visit, she had the latest, fanciest Nokia. It got a virus, and the virus started sending hundreds of X-rated advertising MMS messages to everyone she knew. It was both embarrassing and expensive, since the phone companies over there charge for each individual message.
Fortunately, I was with her at the time and was able to fix the problem with f-secure's anti-virus software for the phone, but the result was a $300 phone bill the phone company refused to write off. My friend is in the upper middle class in the Philipines, and that means a $1,000 monthly income. The phone bill devastated her.
So don't ignore the cellphone virus threat. It can cost real people real money and genuine embarassment thanks to the annoyance and subject matter of those messages. Fortunately for her, most of her friends didn't have the fancy cellphones needed to receive those messages (and catch the virus) but it was still no fun at all explaining them to people.
So don't understate the virus threat. Steve definitely doesn't want stuff like that happening to his beloved iPhone, and as a happy iPhone owner, I can't blame him one bit.
D
From that we know that applications will be signed.. which means some kind of approval method, and its associated cost.
My guess is that you'll probably be required to be a paid ADC member (~$500) to warrant delivery of apps via iTunes.
That says nothing however, about how much you have to charge for applications...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you can't install self-signed apps on your own phone, then wouldn't that make it GPL-incompatible regardless of what Apple charges free-as-in-beer developers?
That doesn't make any sense. You are claiming that developers would not be able to test apps on a real phone (thier own) before release. No way is that going to be the case.
If people can download and compile apps they sign in development mode to run on their own phone, that does not in any way preclude the GPL. Heck, even if what you said was true - it still doesn't preclude the GPL, since you could always release code that people could examine and modify and change. It just would limit who could practically distribute binaries. One could imagine for example a developer working on some code the sell, but also releasing it as GPL and accepting patches that they include back into the release version.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Although I like Apple products I was personally always hoping for a really good Palm phone as I had loved my Palm Pilot ages ago. I really wanted a smartphone but I hated all of them until the iPhone...
Like you said, it's the first cell phone (even outside of smartphones) that doesn't piss me off. And there's a lot of practical value in that, no matter how nice they may look.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Steve Jobs announced the web SDK and said that everyone would be using that from now on (what, over GPRS? Get real steve).
You. and everyone else that says that web development over GPRS (EDGE) ignores the whole point of what makes javascript based web dev so powerful - it greatly reduces traffic by only loading new data, not refreshing the whole page.
Web dev over GPRS is MORE practical that straight HTML as it makes everything go faster and use less bandwidth.
There are many things that are better to do as native apps but you would be surprised at the number of very good web based ones there are.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nice try. Engadget says, "What's an iPhone? 14.3m Windows Mobile phones sold in the past six months alone," but you can read it for yourself:
Ahh... you did notice those were worldwide figures, right? We're talking about the US (for now).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Windows Mobile Smartphone market was already in the millions, with most people would would have bought one already having done so
I'd sure hate to buy into a market that was only in a few millions and seemingly unable to expand from there (you're the one claiming they can't sell new ones). That's a sure sign of weakness, and probably eventual failure (see: Palm).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, that's not a veil of secrecy around APIs, that's a veil of secrecy around *unreleased* APIs. There's a world of difference. Until I read your second comment, I was thinking "what's that guy smoking ?" Apple give away the complete "professional version" of their developer kit, they publish documentation on all their APIs on the net, and frankly they seem a lot more open to developers than Microsoft are, to pluck an example out of the air.
But what *you* mean is that they don't want their thunder stolen before a major release. Well, duh. Apple get a huge PR circus for free precisely because they don't pre-release information, and that's quite literally priceless (sometimes). You can't pay for advertising like they get, and I can see them not wanting to rock that boat.
Now, in the grand scheme of things, NSDictionaryController isn't going to rock the world, and I can empathise with your frustration; however, there may be APIs at some point that probably would have given too much of the game away - APIs into Spotlight (before spotlight was announced), or Time Machine (before TM was announced), or the Core Animation framework for example. If you're Apple, do you go through every API function/method and decide whether it gives too much of the game away ? Or do you issue a blanket statement covering all new API functions/methods ? The latter is obviously the better course legally, and practically too I would imagine.
As for the argument that other companies do this, well other companies have less to lose. Apple aren't doing this to spite developers, or because they haven't considered the downsides. They've looked at it, decided that what they have to lose outweighs what they have to gain, and chosen their course of action - just like *every* company does. A few billion in sales and PR is a hard benefit to overlook, and IMHO a fair chunk of that comes from the very clever and precise manipulation of the media. Apple wouldn't be the Apple of today, if they were just another no-surprises, we-all-know-what's-coming tech company. Design is important in Apple's markets, but it doesn't translate directly to sales, and Apple are doing very well in making that translation at the moment.
Besides, it seems to me that Apple at least *try* to release-it-right rather than release-it-now. I'd like to keep a company with that attitude around a while longer, I don't think it's very common any more.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
applications will be signed.. which means some kind of approval method, and its associated cost. No great surprise there - all mobile platforms have something like it
My phone (Spring Mogul AKA HTC Titan/Hermes) is a Windows CE device. I've yet to find a single native application that I can't install on the device because of some problem signing it. In fact, it's only with the Java sub-system that I run into these kind of issues.
Da Blog
Is a pretty big merit in and of itself. It's important not to construct a whole value system around openness without considering that; software is a tool, not some form of moral action.
iPhones aren't vert extensible, it is true, but consumers don't seem to mind. I think the lesson of the iPhone in this regard is that Java on cellphones isn't really a platform for development as much as it is a way for the cellphone manufacturers to offload their own work on other developers. Want a good web browser or stock ticker or weather widget for your cellphone? When the market asked for these things Nokia and Sony and Moto etc. stuck a JVM into their phones and said "Not our problem!" Apple went to the trouble of making high-quality apps/tools and putting them in the box with the phone, and people seem to prefer having the complete widget instead of having the "choice" to go out and download crap. Having to think about what vendors and software I wanna run on my cellphone, just for me personally, and I wager for a lot of consumers, is sortof a choice overload.
Which is not to say I won't appreciate the SDK when it comes out (I've been missing my old Palm timecode calculator), I just don't think cellphones sell on the virtues of their "platform" as much as sell on their "out-of-box experience." And Apple provides the best out-of-box experience, hands down.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
A few hundred thousand (possibly as high as a fifth, not a third) may have gone Into one mostly country (China) not the many other countries that buy devices and do not have to hack them to use them.
The oranges are still quite juicy and sweet.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Being unable to run as root is where problems occur for developers. Behold the market for Nokia S60 v3 smartphone software. Half of the most popular apps are written by Nokia, because everyone else is busy jumping through flaming hoops to get their apps signed. The process is so damned bureaucratic, innovation freezes, developers loose interest in frustration, and Nokia ends up developing most of what little appears on the platform. Worse yet, the stated goal of providing security through signing is obvious bullshit when signed spyware starts popping up. It's all about Nokia controlling who gets signed and who gets to compete.
You're root comment is a user security issue and has NOTHING to do with the availability of an SDK. If iPhone is unable to run at different user levels it is NOT Mac OS X, because user levels are a fundamental property of any *nix OS.
Macintosh computers aren't riddled with viruses and security breaches, what makes you think Macintosh phones would be any different? If Apple's SDK "solution" is to sign apps instead of fixing their obviously broke ass permission system, then their SDK will be useless anyway just like their other iPhone "SDK." If Apple can't provide a hand held platform as open to developers as their desktop systems, then they will join the long list of companies that failed to revolutionize the mobile market.
Right now they're blowing it, just like they blew it with the Macintosh two decades ago. I wouldn't be so upset about it if I wasn't such a huge fan of the company.
ObviousEvil argues that the iPhone is already too good. While the SDK will only make the iPhone v1 even more attractive, will it undermine the future sales of iPhone v2?
I agree about the browser UI elements being problematic.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It almost seems like what you're saying is the API is open because you can write software that integrates with their services.
But what if you want to modify their services, change iTunes or Front Row or Quicktime itself. I'm not sure how right I am about this, but it seems to me like they want you interacting with their apps, but they don't want you to be able to directly change their apps. Peek only, no touching. Thats not open.
I love it when they prove that moderation on Slashdot is way skewed towards Apple. Go fanbois!