Articles by Foo Fighter
It seems like only yesterday Apple’s servers were overwhelmed by the unbridled lust of developers, feverishly downloading the newly released iPhone SDK, going offline and back again like cheap Christmas tree lights. Today Apple is reporting that over 100,000 SDK downloads have been made in a span of just four days. That’s amazing considering that traffic bottleneck prevented downloading to occur for hours at a time, and Apple’s iPhone developer page was broken for nearly two days.
Makes you wonder how much higher that figure would be if everything had gone smoothly out of the gate. 500,000 perhaps?
Apple and RIM are on a collision course as the two companies go toe to toe vying for enterprise messaging market share. RIM has long held the corporate high ground with its dominant BlackBerry Enterprise Server technology and ubiquitous handsets. But Apple is sending iPhone to business school, adopting Microsoft Exchange support that is certain to give Apple the competitive advantage it needs to challenge RIM’s BlackBerry industrial complex.
This puts Apple in a unique position. Until now the company has narrowly focused its product strategy at consumers, not business. Apple and enterprise go together like Dairy Queen and Lactose intolerance, but iPhone has achieved the kind of sweeping success and brand awareness that makes it marketable to business customers, given the right pedigree of tools.
The combination of iPhone’s consumer appeal and business smarts could produce a perfect storm for Apple. Will it be enough to topple RIM?
Unlimited calling plans seem to be all the rage these days, with every carrier provision subscribers with “all you can speak” plans. Now even iPhone users will soon be able to gab all they want, and not pay dearly for it in the next billing cycle. According to Engadget, AT&T will be soon offer a special iPhone bundled unlimited calling plan for the low price of just $119.99 a month. Not a bad deal I suppose, if you spend ever waking hour of your day with a cell phone symbiotically attached to your face.
Careful observation of one of Apple’s presentation slides taken during last week’s iPhone SDK event reveals a possible firmware 2.0 feature; SPOTLIGHT!In one slide depicting the Contacts list, a small search icon appears at the very top of the screen. Could this be Spotlight for iPhone? We’ll see. It so, I know of many iPhone users who will dance through lawn sprinklers with glee, myself included.
No term strikes more fear and fluster in a coder than the word “Java”, and I’m not talking about the scalding hot cup of Starbucks dark roast you spilled in your lap on the way to work this morning. No, I’m talking about Sun Microsystems’s long touted (and lamented) portable programming environment designed to run small applications through virtual runtimes. Java is best known for its ever-reaching marketing slogan “Write once, run anywhere”, though veteran developers will tell you the only thing Java truly excels at is crashing.
Now, for better or worse (I’m leaning towards the latter), Java support is coming to iPhone. For end users its arrival will go largely unnoticed and have little impact, save for its manifestation in mobiles gaming. For corporate users, however, it heralds the iPhone’s arrival in the enterprise where custom Java applications are lingua franca. This is indeed important news. Just not to me. Next!
Response to Apple’s release of an iPhone SDK has been overwhelming; literally. Since it became publicly available yesterday, Apple’s developer website has been swamped with user registrations and download requests. I personally have made numerous attempts to download the SDK, all unsuccessfully. If that’s any indication of the frenzied bustle of app development we might expect, I’d say we can expect a torrent of iPhone applications in the coming months. Bring your umbrella.
Apple has posted the video from its March 6 iPhone Software Roadmap event, available for viewing. Go here.
Months ago Apple made a promise to developers, committing to one day release an SDK and open the iPhone for platform development. Today it made good on its promise, and reaffirmed that old adage “good things come to those who wait”.
For those of you looking for forward to building apps for iPhone, don’t plan on writing that code on Windows. According to story posted on iPodNN, Apple will be making its upcoming iPhone SDK available for Mac only, with Leopard as required OS. That?s not surprising given that iPhone runs on an embedded flavor of OSX, and it?s not as though Mac software can be written in Microsoft Visual Studio. Apparently Apple will be releasing an enhanced version of Xcode, with built-in tools for iPhone application development.
So there you have it. Buy a Mac mini, fire up Xcode, and start compiling.
Today is the big day for soon-to-be iPhone developers, anxiously awaiting for an SDK to drop from the mothership. Before that happens, I’d like to clear up some comflicting reports that are spreading through the ether. As you might have guessed, Apple’s distribution portal for native iPhone applications will be iTunes, just as it now for iPod media and games. However, according to my sources that will only apply to commercial (as in BUY NOW) software.
Free and or open source applications won’t by tied to the great orifice that is iTunes. Those applications will have a method for loading on iPhone, provided they adhere to Apple’s development guidelines and are signed with a special digital signature, ala Symbian, for security purposes.
Now, that is what I’ve been told by reliable sources. We’ll find out in just a few hours whether this is fact or fiction. I’m banking on the former.
"
