Analyzing Apple's iPhone Strategy

Galen Gruman submitted infoworld's summary of Apple's grand strategy for the iPhone. He points out that the real important part of the new iPhone is the software, not the hardware. He talks about the new SDK stuff, the ad-hoc app distribution, and other stuff. It's a reasonable read if you have been ignoring the iPhone and want to know what the hype is about over this release, but doesn't break any new ground if you've been paying attention.

Comments

Re:Objective C

[Space cowboy]

Hmm - I have to assume you've not used ObjC much or at all - you have to take it with its class library (Cocoa), similar to Java, but it's ridiculously easy to use once you've spent a week or so learning it. Literally, it took me a week to be proficient in this "new" language.

Applications don't need namespaces - frameworks do, but applications should be perfectly happy being run in their own (default) namespace. I think most people will be writing applications on the iPhone, not frameworks.

As for tools, XCode comes with data-modelling tools to create entity relationship diagrams/models that integrate with your code, it comes with fantastic dtrace-driven graphical performance monitoring tools, and an excellent integrated gdb-based debugger which does things like fix-and-continue, step back, etc.

Just putting some context into place,

Simon