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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."
It was originally announced for February. Remember that we weren't going to get a proper SDK... Steve Jobs announced the web SDK and said that everyone would be using that from now on (what, over GPRS? Get real steve). It was only when they realized that (a) nobody gave a shit about web apps, and (b) millions of users were running native apps anyway, and apple wasn't getting a cut, that he announced the SDK.
One sick of phones having nearly-useless web browsers, when the only phone with a useful one is locked.
Any cheap old phone can run Opera Mini. I too was annoyed by the poor quality of my phone's built in browser, but now I never have any trouble. It even has features like server-side downscaling of image sizes, thus reducing download times (and costs) - so even if your phone does have a decent browser, it's worth a look.
Right, because the iPhone has suffered terribly from the lack of 3rd-party applications. Sales are in single digits, and frankly owning one is an embarrassment. Not.
I'm an iPhone app developer. The API is actually pretty nice "under the surface". UIKit is a lean-and-mean version of Cocoa, and behaves just like it in most respects. Being able to write Leopard-style ObjC on a device that goes in your pocket is frankly awesome. Unless you have *specific* examples of this "ragged" nature, I'm just gonna call bullshit on your entire comment, and leave it at that.
Now a proper SDK will be a step forward, no doubt, but that's because we'll get things like named-constants rather than use 0x02 to specify values. Classdump, which is how the API was recovered, can only give you the method signatures and names. We'll also get the official C compiler, not one that works 98% of the time, real debugging, and perhaps even a simulator built into XCode, so you don't have to deploy to a target device in order to test the code. Oh yeah, and I'd expect to see some documentation too...
Lacking any of these things doesn't point to it being "ragged" architecturally, every single point is a consequence of the hacks that were required to get *any* development going on the iPhone. Apple don't have that problem...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!