The story is (briefly, I suspect) available on Apple’s “hot news” page. (Although I caught the news of it on Twitter from Buzz, Gruber and Dan Pasco).
The text of the announcement reads like we’ll be seeing some sort of signed binaries mechanism for the executables. That’s something that Apple had been starting to push 18 months ago at WWDC 2006, so it’s really no surprise. It will be interesting to see what it takes to sign and deploy code within the iPhone or iPod touch – we’ll apparently be able to deploy to both with this SDK.
I think a large open question will be distribution mechanisms for Applications. AppTapp Installer made the hacks really easy to download and install. I hope they’ll be back with the official SDK and a set of common technologies to make getting applications super-easy.
I’m excited to see the SDK coming available. Now I won’t feel like I’m potentially wasting time developing apps down that path. Of course, I don’t really have a clue of what I’m going to develop – but the potential is very exciting.
Rhonabwy 