Steve Jobs Announces iPhone SDK 467
An anonymous reader writes "It finally happened. Steve Jobs announced an iPhone SDK today. The plan is to release it in February, and the suggestion is that apps will need to be digitally signed (not unlike digital signing in Leopard). Here's hoping that developing for the iPhone/Touch will be cheap (or free) enough to allow the folks who have been writing apps to continue doing so. Says Jobs: 'It will take until February to release an SDK because we're trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once--provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task.'"
Digital signing (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the quote that may have misled:
So, what they're really saying is that they're hoping to do something along the same lines as signing, but not signing per se. This actually may be the most interesting part of their announcement, in that it could signal the next step forwards in indicating trust and providing clarity of who worked on what. Here's hoping it's not just repackaging.
Re:Digital signing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ipod touch (Score:5, Informative)
Yep - FTA:
Re:final pieces ... (Score:3, Informative)
It's great. Best gadget ever. Hacking the touch is pure software too, so you can just restore it with iTunes if an update you have to have comes along.
Re:February is kind of a long time, isn't it? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Informative)
I'm personally happy to have the device now, as it's extremely useful in a variety of ways (hence the fanboi status). But an SDK is only one of many things that are a tad overdue.
Re:Security weakness of their own making (Score:5, Informative)
They made the apps run as root due to lack of time to figure out the security properly. This is the same reason they didn't release a SDK.
By February, we'll have a firmware with reengineered OS and apps that don't run as root. The SDK will only support this firmware and newer.
Re:Digital signing (Score:5, Informative)
I'm just going to point out that Windows has had digitally-signed apps since (at least) Windows 98, and that nearly every system library and executable in Windows XP and Windows Vista is signed. Vista even checks the signature before you see the UAC dialog, and the dialog for signed apps looks completely different (and has different keyboard shortcuts).
Windows Mobile also has signed apps.
Of course, I'm sure that some Mac fan is going to point out how this is another Apple innovation.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
There were lots of other little clues people found that the iPhone had either had plans for a third-party SDK which was scuttled, or had a third-party SDK in the works but not yet announced. So I admit, I am with the folks who are saying that Jobs probably had this planned from day one, but held off on the announcements until closer to the SDK/security methods being sorted out for marketing/publicity/spin reasons.
3 months after the phone was released is not a huge waiting period, but if he'd announced ahead of time that the iPhone would have a native SDK in February, lots of folks would have waited both on buying phones and on doing iPhone development. Instead, now we have hackers who have already worked on third-party native apps, there's all kinds of web-apps to keep those who won't jailbreak busy in the meantime.
Love him or hate him, one thing Jobs knows how to do is build anticipation, and manage publicity. He'll take bad press for a while simply so that he can sit on some announcement to greatest spin effect.
Re:final pieces ... (Score:4, Informative)
Have a look at FileMark Maker [insanelygreattees.com]. It is an app that that runs on the Mac and lets you sync and store any
It's a joy to use on my Touch, and I've tried it with a 100 page PDF. However long filenames screw up the bookmark display seem to be a bit of a problem, so trim them down a bit before syncing.
I'm just surprised that more people don't seem to know about this app.
So, how long before Java? (Score:5, Informative)
It exists for PalmOS, it exists for Windows Mobile, it exists for other handhelds, and I imagine that both IBM and Sun would explode with joy at the possibility of getting it onto the iPhone and iPod Touch.
For those who don't know, this is IBM's J2ME/JavaME runtime for small systems. If you have Java on your PalmOS, Windows Mobile, or even many Linux handhelds, it's probably due to this being loaded on or embedded into it.
If we don't get that, maybe we'll get a port of the open-source reference implementation of JavaME:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhoneME_(software) [wikipedia.org]
It already builds for both ARM (current iPhone) and x86 (rumored future iPhone) instruction sets.
Either way, looks to me like once there's a general dev kit, a JVM isn't going to be too far off. Anyone want to make predictions about how long it'll take or what form it'll come in?
Misinformation (Score:5, Informative)
The iPhone essentially runs a cut and trimmed version of OSX, so getting an SDK for it is NOT some massive undertaking
I mean, look, despite Apple's attempts to keep people from using their own phones, random hax0rs got a working SDK up within days
A iPhone SDK would use a gcc cross-compiler (since the iPhone isn't running PowerPC or Intel chip -- by the way, gcc makes it easy to build a cross-compiler so this isn't a big deal)
Not a massive undertaking at all.
No, that's trivial mate. Tell you what, we'll do you two, in case one breaks - have it to you next Tuesday... Not.
Writing whatever they needed for the initial (general public who don't give the shake of a rat's tail about the SDK) release, then writing/polishing a general developer release is so obviously the way to go, I can't believe people are still talking about it. And if you expected 'The Steve' to lay out all his plans ahead of time, you've obviously been in a coma for the last decade. Welcome to the new century.
Simon.
(*) I think this is actually resolved in version-3 of the compiler. I'm still stuck with v2 because I can't get the LLVM part to compiler on my mac for some reason.
Re:February is kind of a long time, isn't it? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Informative)
Well, sort of. They didn't mention that the iPhone version of the OS has UIKit rather than AppKit, for example. hello.c would Just Work (if you have Mobile Terminal in which to run it), but J. Random GUI App wouldn't.
You need more than stable API's, you also need stable ABI's, and they could well have released it without stable ABI's - all the bundled apps would have to be recompiled if the ABI changed, but that's doable. You might believe that they shouldn't have released the iPhone without stable ABIs; I believe otherwise, and, quite frankly, think arguing that they shouldn't have released the iPhone without stable ABI's is bogus.
Even API changes, although they're more disruptive to the code base, wouldn't be out of the question.
Unstable API's and ABI's, however, do cause problems for third-party apps, so they need to stabilize those before releasing an SDK.
Re:bug report (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, it's not as if AT&T sells cards for PC's that support EDGE [att.com], so that any packet your PC could send out over Wi-Fi could also be sent out over EDGE.