Apple announced the iPhone SDK the other day and there is a lot of discussion about it among those that I know. Overall, I’m quite happy with Apple’s offering; while I don’t have a huge interest in writing handheld applications anymore (I wrote Newton and Palm software for way too long), it might be fun to dabble in some stuff. In addition, I have some clients interested in apps.
The Good
- Xcode is the development environment.
- There is a simulator.
- Apple is charging money to get a certificate and release applications; this might keep out some of the weekend developers that don’t have good development practices.
- The SDK looks very complete.
- Background applications can’t be written. Yeah, hopefully this will make the platform more robust.
The Bad
- Apple won’t take my money to become a developer, yet. I applied, but who knows if I’ll be accepted.
- The $99 fee is too low. Yes, I said it. The barrier to entry is so minor, that every Tom, Dick, and Harry will sign up. I don’t want my iPhone to crash and have people write crap. I’ve been through that with the Palm; there is so much crap that people just throw out there. I want quality and people that are serious about development. I have nothing against hobby developers (except they drag the value of software down by releasing stuff for next to nothing), but the entire iPhone platform will get a bad reputation if people download software and have their iPhone crash. Maybe Apple will yank the apps that crash.
- No Interface Builder support, yet (I’m impatient).
- Enterprise developers are charged more than commercial developers; I’m not sure what this is about, but maybe it has to do with a different distribution mechanism. I have a client that wants to sign up and doesn’t have a problem with the fee, but it seems to me that Apple should just have one fee.
- Why were some companies chosen to get early access and others weren’t? I’ve been developing handheld applications for over a decade and no one contacted me. I guess they were just looking for the wow factor; one of the companies that was selected has written garbage in the past on other platforms, but the company name means something…I guess quality doesn’t.
The Ugly
- Apple underestimated the demand. It took hours for me to grab the SDK; to top it off, someone brilliant put a link to the SDK on Apple’s homepage to drive even more traffic to it.
I’ve only poked around in the SDK as I’m trying to get ReceiptWallet 2.0 out the door, but will take a closer look in the upcoming weeks.
Seeing that they mentioned the UI builder during the presentation, surprising they haven\’t released it. I guess for the apps Apple doesn\’t allow, people can always get them from installer.app if they want to jailbreak their unit (like I did, plus I can get always get apps that run in the background if I want).