By Dylan Tweney
Steve Jobs has a showman's gift for getting crowds to cheer for new products and features. So it's notable when the crowd goes silent, as it did after Jobs announced today that there would be no software development kit for the iPhone. Whether the crowd's silence stemmed from bitter disappointment or merely being underwhelmed, however, was hard to say.
"It's pretty predictable," says Jim Rodden, a staff engineer for Sling Media, of the iPhone's lack of an SDK. Given the short time until the iPhone's launch on June 29, and the availability of a full-fledged web browser on the device, this approach makes sense.
"The lack of an SDK for the iPhone is to be expected," says Tony Gray, with the computer science department of the University of Tasmania. "It's the only way they could get development done in the short time frame."
But it does leave some holes: Rodden is wondering how his company will be able to build support for a possible iPhone client to display media streams from its Slingbox devices. (As for whether his company is indeed planning to release an iPhone client, Rodden wouldn't comment.)
And other engineers grumbled that Jobs' demo of building Google Maps integration into an iPhone app was an example not of iPhone development, but of Google Maps development – since it was utilizing Google features that are available on any web platform.
Not everyone agrees that Jobs' web-based approach to iPhone development
is a mistake. "Yet another closed platform would be a daft way to go,"
says Ian Maccoll, of the University of Queensland school of information
technology. "This gives you a way to deploy across Windows, Mac, and
iPhone all at once."
The most bitter disappointment of the day, however, was that no iPhones were included with the copies of Leopard that Apple was handing out to developers after the keynote presentation. Developers who want to create iPhone apps will have to wait until June 29, just like the rest of us.
