The long-awaited iPhone software development kit is here, and overall I’m pretty impressed with the amount of power and flexibility Apple is giving to third-party developers. Beating Daniel’s expectations, Apple is giving access to the iPhone’s native API. There are a few gotchas though. For example, only one third-party app can run at a time, and it can’t run in the background.
There was another disappointment from my point of view, and this is because I work for IBM (although the following is not necessarily IBM’s opinion). Where was the Lotus Notes announcement? About a month and a half ago, the web was abuzz with IBM’s plans to introduce a native Lotus Notes application for the iPhone. IBM then said it wasn’t ready yet, and during yesterday’s announcement, all the enterprise hoopla centered around Microsoft’s Exchange and ActiveSync. I think IBM missed a chance to show “enterprise” also means Notes and Domino, not just Exchange. (Whether this is because Jobs was unhappy IBM was jumping the gun and upstaging Apple’s own announcement, I don’t know.)
Ah, to quote Douglas Adams, it is, as is often the case, simply that reality itself has got it wrong. 🙂
My biggest complaint is the ban on interpreters. Obviously this prevents Java or Flash on the iPhone. Not everybody is a big fan of programming in Objective-C. Of course some folks aren’t daunted by the license. Tim Burks is already busy bringing Ruby to the iPhone.