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While I was gone at CTIA, there’s been a bunch of things that have happened that I didn’t get time to properly write about. So today, we’ll have a bit of an iPhone news smörgåsbord. There’s been a fair amount of news, a fair amount of not-news, and some of the things that I’ve been reading are just plain wrong.

Apple Dealing with Film-Makers Directly for iTunes
Apple has sidestepped some of the major studios for some films, opting instead to deal directly with film-makers. This could be a sign of things to come — it would be great to not have to report every major film-studio or TV channel contract tiff.

Apple iPhone Dev Center
Apple has created a web site devoted to developers that are interested in putting their programs on the iPhone. Apple is calling it the iPhone Dev Center, and it’s a repository of tips, tricks, and guidelines to follow should anyone want to make an iPhone web app. It’s also probably a list of instructions that one would have to follow to get listed as a featured application on Apple’s web app listing.

Molson Reveals iPhone on Rogers in January?
For any Canadian readers, Molson ran a contest that had an iPhone as the prize. They had a disclaimer on the iPhone prize, stating that it couldn’t be activated on the Rogers network until January. So, odds are pretty good that the iPhone will be out in Canada in January. Molson has since pulled the language for the contest, saying they have no idea when anything is coming out ever. And they never had any idea. (images below via Electronista)

Is the iPhone Running Leopard?
There’s an article at Wired that delves deeper into Jobs’ open letter about 3rd party applications on the iPhone and the connection to Leopard. One of the tidbits that Jobs talks about briefly is signing applications, and Wired has a good look into what that would mean for 3rd party iPhone apps. And, there’s some discussion whether the iPhone is based off of Leopard or not: “It’s not known for sure at this point, but all indications are that the iPhone is a Leopard-based device,” as stated by Carl Howe, analyst at Blackfriars. It clearly is. Witness the uname -a of my laptop on 10.4 vs. the uname -a of my iphone:

The important bit there is the kernel version. Apple releases the OSX frameworks to correspond with kernel versions of darwin for every version of OSX. The iPhone has been running Leopard (9.0) since it came out in June. My 10.4 laptop is running darwin 8.10.0, which corresponds to 10.4.10.

iPhone Security Faults
Meanwhile, there’s been a rash of complaints about the iPhone’s security. You may have seen headlines that compare the iPhone to Windows 95, for example. It’s of course, a loaded comparison, made for sensationalism. You could just as well compare the iPhone’s security to Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows XP if you’re logged in as an administrator (which is everybody — you can barely run Office as a limited user). But, Windows 95 gets the headline. Since the iPhone is made of UNIX, user separation is built-in, expect apps to run as something other than administrator/root/super-user when the SDK update comes out. Perhaps earlier; we can’t know as Apple isn’t commenting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that ‘run as root’ is a good security model. It’s so bad, it’s not even a security model.

iPhone de-bricking: re-virginizer tool available
The Elite team posted a re-virginizer tool that people can use to restore the ability to upgrade. This tool locks the iPhone with the proper bits in place on the iPhone radio; some of the free iPhone unlock tools wrote stuff to the iPhone baseband radio that was invalid; this led to bricked phones when it came time to update the firmware to 1.1.1.

AT&T Upgrading Core Network
Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, was interviewed recently and he talked about many things concerning the iPhone and AT&T’s network. Their core should make for faster downloads for anything that uses AT&T’s networks, wired or wireless. That means us: anyone using an iPhone should see a smidgen of a benefit, but the real help comes when we’re using 3G fast internet iPhones.

figure 1: John Gruber

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has posted an excellent discussion on the various subtleties of the language used in Steve Jobs’ iPhone SDK letter. He talks of HTML widgets vs. the stripped-down Cocoa API, the security of the current iPhone, the hidden compliment-slash-dig on Nokia and their recent “open to anything” marketing slogan, signed apps, the iTunes App store, and with his usual attention to detail and insight. Well worth the read there, like any long Gruber post.

Gruber also points to a blog post for OSX developers that intend to write applications for the iPhone, which led to a comment-discussion by several mac developers, and where they intend to aim their development efforts — both in functionality of their applications, and price thereof. It looks like there’s plenty of hope for the $5 app, if they can be guaranteed to be paid. There’s still the lingering question of how available the SDK will be — and that’s excellently addressed by Frasier Spiers on a blog post at his site.

The Leopard-January-SDK rumor is floating around again, this time at Businessweek (we reported on it here, and there’s another rumor concerning development here. With it comes talk of a system development kit, or a way to get applications on an iPhone that doesn’t require hacking. There’s no indication as to whether it’s a real SDK or whether it’s a way to sync HTML widgets. My gut hunch is widgets, but it’s also possible that the iPhone requires the same version of XCode that Leopard uses. [via

The New York Times has a neat article on third party applications and how the iPhone is currently the only device on AT&T’s network that doesn’t support them. The article has some good things to say about Palm too, which I always welcome. The big gist of it is how Jobs’ quote from a January Newsweek interview doesn’t jive with reality:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform… You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

Whereas the reality of the situation is that Cingular/ATT welcomed development on every single other phone they had on their network, whether it be Java/J2ME, PalmOS development, Windows Development, or Flash Lite / whatever. This is backed up by Mark Bercow, Senior VP of Development at Palm. Talk about your David vs. Goliath situations here; I feel like Steve Jobs’ famous reality distortion field just failed for a second or something. But, there’s another quote that the Times dug up that I’d forgotten about from his video conversation with Walt Mossberg at the All Things D conference in July:

“This is a very important trade-off between security and openness. We want both. We’ve got good ideas, and sometime later this year, we can open it up to third-party apps, and keep security.”

The more I think about this quote, the more I think he’s talking about widgets here. You only really have to worry about a widget’s security if there’s a browser bug or exploit, and HTML/CSS/AJAX is definitely open. He probably doesn’t want to open up a full native SDK until the software and hardware platforms are stable and proven, much like he did with the original Mac series. That is, if he wants a full native SDK available to the public at all.

There are a few other interesting tidbits from the article that I can’t help but mention:

1. Two-thirds of Treo owners have purchased 3rd party apps
2. Ten percent of Treo owners have purchased 10 or more 3rd party apps
3. AT&T has a website to get developers on all of their development platforms except the iPhone.

Ars Technica has sources that indicate that Apple is prepping Mobile Safari to run applications and web pages offline. You know, widgets. These widgets will use the same technologies as the AJAX web apps that are out there now — HTML, CSS, asynchronous Javascript and XML, cookies, etc., but with the added bonus of a little extra local storage. Maybe some javascript functions that allow you to access the actual API of the phone for contact / calendar integration and the like will make it as well.

figure 1: the Widget manager from OSX 10.4. The iPhone has been destined for widgets. Note the similarity of this on the iPhone (figure 2)

figure 2: The bottom bar on the iPhone. Note the similarity. I do not think the similarity is accidental. Why would the iPod Touch have a different bottom bar?

Apple is working on a Google Gears-like system to cache online applications for use in mode, or other situations where the network is not available. Their expected timeline for announcing or delivering this is January. In case you’re new to the Apple world, January is code for Macworld Expo, the same Expo in which Jobs announced the iPhone.

Lastly, their source indicated that Apple is not currently working on a native SDK for release to the general public, and that AJAX Web apps are going to be the way to go. Ars Technica’s Apple source has expressed some frustration in that:

“You can’t write [bleep]ing [bleep] in that…. Jobs is a control freak and doesn’t want people messing with perfection.”

He’s not alone in his frustration. You can practically read the spittle over at gizmodo. Jesus Diaz is so pissed he’s replaced every outbound link in his article with another link that links back to Gizmodo. Macworld.co.uk meanwhile is confusing Javascript with Java. There won’t be Java on the iPhone. Jobs confirmed that maybe a day after he announced the iPhone in January.

Speaking personally, I know that it’s not the same as having native applications. But, I am glad that there will finally be some mechanism for apps beyond the data URL trick and bookmarklets. I’ve long said that I expect some sort of 3rd party app, whether it be widgets or native. Frankly, I’d much prefer native, and that’s part of the reason that I’ll likely never update my hacked 4GB iPhone (I need it for screenshots and the like), but widgets can do a lot of what many, if not most, people want, and I eagerly look forward to that on the 8GB iPhone.