I had to chuckle at Quentin and his iPhone SDK annoyance. Of course, I beg to differ – but while the “SDK” announced for the iPhone isn’t what I’d secretly hoped for, it’s certainly what I expected.
Nope, it’s not an SDK where you get full command and control – “all the good shit”. And any developer doing “web applications” knows that there’s a lot more fixed costs to developing and deploying applications on the web than in doing a desktop app. You’ve got to have a server, deal with all those browsers that don’t agree on how to render things, and shoe-horn what you can into the limits of Javascript, CSS, and remote method calls that pull down XML or JSON formatted data.
Gruber’s got a pretty good point that the message to the desktop oriented developers in the audience was insulting. But the reality of getting an SDK from Apple at this point – well, let’s just leave it that it would have been a RADICAL departure from all previous Apple SDK commitments. They’re “slow” when it comes to releasing SDKs, and careful. They don’t want to support any more than they actually have to (hence the non-SDK for XCode, and Project Builder before that…), and they did just complete the phone. Like they actually have a good sense of what’s useful and not at this point?
And yeah, I know – most Apple desktop dev’s would give their eye teeth to have even a beta/hacked SDK. I rather expect that someone will hack away into it before too long… maybe somewhere around the 30th of this month. I know I’ll be looking for one.
Rhonabwy 