iPhone SDK... let me get this straight..
 

http://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/enterprise/

So if you have an iPhone... you can push Exchange email, calendars and contacts.... but if you only have a Mac.. you can only do exchange email...

Am I right... or am I missing something?

I just read the live blog on Engadget. Apple actually went out and purchased a license to add ActiveSync Exchange support (whatever that is) to the iPhone.

It's all setup on the phone itself, I'm guessing you can use a Mac or PC.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/06/l...ss-conference/

BTW, I didn't know the iPhone had OpenGL support!

Well, it's OpenGL Embedded. Which is still very rockin' for a cell phone.

All in all, this looks like a really, really strong SDK. I'm looking forward to using it, but the ADC site is basically hammered to the floor right now. I was able to register, but the site was overwhelmed before I could begin the SDK download. :(

Would be nice to see Mail/iCal/AddressBook get the same level of Exchange support... :mad:

Why aren't you more pissed about the iPhone getting (presumably) good exchange support before Microsoft Entourage? That seems ten times more ridiculous to me.

Edit: Also, they recently paid for this license from Microsoft. They may be working on adding support to parts of Mac OS X, who knows. But expecting three different apps and their underlying frameworks to get this stuff magically at the same time . . . this stuff takes time, man.

coz I don't use Entourage!

So touch users (once AGAIN) have to pony up money for the third party goodness?

Sweet Jesus. I am so happy I sold my iPod touch and am getting an iPhone soon. It seems Touch users are getting shafted left and right on everything Apple's putting out as of late.

The actual SDK seems pretty nice. And that emulator is pretty darn slick. I'll send 'em my $99 to publish stuff.

I presume WWDC will have extensive tracks on all of this.

Blame Sarbanes-Oxley. (Also, Apple gets a cut of my AT&T subscription fees, so I've already paid for it.)

Seriously tired of the whining over this.

Do you have to be on intel to see this??

I get no iPhone stuff after the install.

G4 Powerbook 1.5ghz

The beta is Intel-only. This was noted to you before you downloaded it, and is noted in the readme on the disk image. As posted to xcode-users by Chris Espinosa, Xcode manager:

Please remember that the details of the SDK beta are under NDA and that except for information that is available without an ADC login, we cannot discuss it here.

Thanks,
Note to self Most read TFM.. :D

Although a cut of the profits (30%, I think) from the apps sold at the the "App Store" will go to Apple, it seems they will allow freeware apps to be listed free of charge.

Offtopic: This is much nicer than the way Verizon does things with it's "BREW App Manager". With BREW, all apps are required to go through Qualcomm's 'reviewing' process, which costs about $2000. After it's reviewed, you have to pay a load of additional fees to the telcos for them to also 'review' your app. If you pass Qualcomm's test, but not the telcos, well, your out of luck. If you app isn't "Certified" by both Q and the telcos, it won't be able to install on your phone.

Many people hate BREW (including me), and want to be able to use the various Java applets on our phones. Some people have managed to flash the BREW firmware out and use the original (non-BREW) firmware, but it's pretty difficult to do, as there's hundreds of different phones, and dozens on slightly different firmware revisions on each one.

Thank you. Someone needed to say that.

I am also getting tired of people whining over this.

Okey, Sarbanes-Oxley sucks. I apologize Apple, we still friends? Want to go out for a beer sometime? :)

Apple makes money off of my iPhone subscription every month. How much do they get from your monthly iPod Touch user fee?

In addition to this, there's also a very strong possibility that Apple accounts for the iPod Touch in a way that doesn't include the software development costs for the iPhone OS (since it started on/as the iPhone) and its supporting applications, and as such Sarbanes ends up pushing Apple toward charging "nominal fees" for additional features that reflect this difference. Jobs has alluded to this in the past.

It's just a hunch of mine. SOX is largely necessary in the post-Enron era, but it's still a bitch. :/

Good points all around. Guess I never saw it like that. Forgive my outlashes of anger being an ex-iTouch owner >.<

I'll make sure to get an iPhone and reap all the benefits, though. ;)

For the record: you can explain all you want, most iPod Touch users don't really care. $40 for new features? When a person who buys a new touch gets all of those capabilities included in their iPod Touch out of the box?

Look folks, I can see what you are saying, I can even see why you would be tired of the whining. But it's not going to stop, most people think charging for the updates is weird. In my opinion Apple shouldn't be charging for these updates because charging for them is creating bad press and bad feelings towards Apple. Bad press means less sales, which means less revenue. It's just an all around bad idea IMHO.

Also, since I just spotted a different iPhone SDK thread posted by someone who obviously cannot read, I want to remind everyone:

The iPhone SDK is under a non-disclosure agreement. Anyone who has access to it cannot discuss details that require membership in the iPhone SDK beta program to know. Keep that in mind when posting. Thanks. :)

In my opinion, Apple should follow federal accounting law and not tick off any SOX investigators.

http://www.michaelmistretta.com/appl...-touch-upgrade

Some people will no doubt be put off by the fees. But it's all a matter of perspective. We're all used to paying for software upgrades to applications and operating systems. The new iPod software is a huge upgrade that adds great value to the machine. Paying a nominal fee shouldn't be too awful. And people who are already happy with their machines aren't forced to upgrade at all.

Why didn't they just use the same accounting method they used for the AppleTV and iPhone? They obviously could have done the exact same thing, plenty of electronics companies do it. It said so right in the article you linked. I'm sticking with my "bad idea" opinion I had before.

I said it before and I'll say it again. Current iPod touch buyers are paying the same price for a far superior product to the same iPod touch sold 3 months ago. Most consumers will not understand this. Yes, if you think about it, it makes sense. But Apple should have accounted for the fact that most people won't think about this, and they should have released the patches for free. You want to keep the consumer happy.

- Not forced to upgrade
- Not already paying for the development through subscription fees
- Sarbanes-Oxley
- Pretty solid value for the cost
- It costs more than $20 for a decent dinner with your S.O.
- As such, you won't really care after six hours
- Sarbanes-Oxley

Yeah, I know it would be great to get it for free, but between SOX and us iPhoners already paying subscriptions partially to Apple . . . well, things are how they are.

There are better things to pester Apple about, I think. NTFS write support in Mac OS X, more advanced Mail features for iPhone OS, being a little more open with their roadmaps for enterprise customers . . .

So. Back on track. Without any developers breaking NDA, what kind of stuff are you guys looking forward to in iPhone third-party land in the next year?

Jesus Christ, MOVE ON. MOVE ON. MOVE ON.

We can have a WORTHWHILE THREAD or we can rehash Sarbanes-Oxley for the next month. Let me know so I can decide whether or not I should bother reading the thread at all from now on.

I agree 100%.

For people who have not seen the videocast of the event, watching that would be a good place to start. Then consider signing up for the a free basic ADC account and check it out for yourself.

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/iphoneroadmap/
http://developer.apple.com/

Um, sorry? I hadn't know there had been a debate over this issue. It's important to me, because I hear about it a lot at my campus. But if no one here really wants to discuss it, I'm fine with moving on.

As for iPhone apps. I really want to make a game that utilizes the touch screen in a new and creative way. I'm thinking of making an air hockey game at the moment (shhh!).

This from the Keynote for those who didn't catch it.

About the nominal fee for touch. "The way we account for the iPhone is with subscription accounting, so we take the revenue over two years. The way that we account for iPods, is more normal accounting. And so because of that, we have to charge a nominal fee, but I don't see that changing. We'll set it when we release the software in June. But we don't look at this as a profit opportunity."

Mikey-San was right on about it. It's SOx and nothing can be done about it.

no one cares, not even me

please. move. on.

Does anyone remember that wooden toy game where you turned two knobs that tilted a wooden board to guide a marble through a maze? There were holes in the wood to lose the ball in. Eventually, you just picked the ball up and moved it past the part of the maze you couldn't get through. Tilt the phone to move the marble. Cheat mode where you can pick up the ball with your finger. ;)

A neat idea. (I didn't have to pick up the ball to get past the tough parts -- I could run it the whole way through the maze. The secret was to put a drop of dishwashing liquid (or soap dissolved in water) on the dowels holding the knob shafts and supporting the tilt table gimbals where they penetrated the box and gimbal frames. This eliminated the stiction that otherwise interfered with really fine control of the tilt. My brother and I were whizzes.)

Expect at least one racing game, too, where you hold the phone in landscape and turn it like a steering wheel. Slight tilt away from you will be throttle, tilt toward will be brake. (Or there will be small brake/throttle buttons on the side of the viewport and tilt away/toward will be gear shifting. Or fire the rocket launcher.)

Hey, that sounds like a great name for an organization! :cool:

These ideas make me think of a handheld Wii system.

Well, the iPhone does have motion sensing to a degree. I haven't looked through all the frameworks (and would not discuss them if I had), but if we have any access to them, I don't see why we wouldn't be able to use that motion capture for a game as well.

i finally watched the keynote, and thought the exact same thing, i have one question though, how powerful is the iphone/ipod touch, in terms of cpu, gpu and ram?

I know it has a 400MHz processor under the hood.

Those with jailbroken phones/iPods can download sysinfo and look.

that isnt a lot considering, the n95 has a dual core cpu...

OmniFocus from OmniGroup.

A few applications from me. Probably a game first to use the touch screen interaction.

The new UI challenges (touch screen, motion sensor, position detection...) will sure produce a lot of interestings results... good and bad. But there will be new conventions.
I'm very excited about this.

Apple is one of the very few companies that updates products after they are released. Sony, Sandisk, Nokia, Samsung, et al, would make you buy a whole new device to get the feature upgrades. Think of Apple's $20 upgrade fee as a $280 discount on a new iPod.

Benefit: Continued discounts on ever-new iPods
 

I couldn’t agree more -- and I think this is where the true strength of the iPhone and iPod Touch lie. In the months and years to come, the owners are going to see the functionality of their devices transformed by software updates and third-party apps that will be very cheap, indeed. :)

How many other music player and cell phone producers -- if any -- can boast the same?


The other strength, at least of the iPhone, is this: recurring income. To my knowledge Apple is the only cell phone producer in the world that has managed to pull that one off!

Anyways, that’s my NOK 0.02.


-- ArcticStones

.

Apple's strict terms of service for its iPhone SDK are receiving grumbles. Voice over IP apps that want to use the data connection will be blocked. Only Safari can be used as a browser, all others are forbidden. The SDK prevents Sun from following through on its Java port. Aren't Apple's methods a bit like Comcast's content filtering, and Microsoft's IE antics?

@chabig and ArcticStones -- Just to forestall any other comments, I thought we had decided to leave this debate alone so we can discuss the software possibilities of the new SDK?

Along those lines. A lot of people are mentioning games that interact with the new touch screen, which makes sense since it is a pretty novel UI. But I want to know who we are going to take advantage of the touch screen to simplify day to day apps. As unexciting as a it sounds, do you think this will have an effect on things like flow chart creation?

Also, I'm wondering about on site design programs. I.e., can we make a small port of a 3D modeling program so we can make small changes to blueprints on sight? Or perhaps a small port of the CS3 suite so we can make small changes to ad's on the go. Granted, it seems like a laptop would be the better option for both. But I can't help but think that the touchscreen offers some unique advantages.

Granted...that is really more a theory than anything else. Can anyone offer some practical insight?

Edit: @NovaScotian -- In some ways, yes. But I tend to agree with Apple on this one. I think they are just opening up the platform one bit at a time to make sure they can keep it secure every step of the way. Apple prides itself on security, and the iPhones popularity has made it a very high profile target. It only makes sense that they would take every precaution... I think that, given time, they will start to open up further parts of the phone. But for now, I think this is enough, and I think we should see some amazing applications.

I agree, Z, but the PR would be better if they said so.

Everyone thinks they're smart and like to bitch, basically. You'll notice most of the people screaming aren't developers, just pundits and self-important bloggers.

Who in their RIGHT MIND thought AT&T was going to allow VoIP over their data network? iPhones have unlimited data plans, and this would completely circumvent any non-unlimited calling plan. I think it's a miracle Apple was able to say that they won't block VoIP via wi-fi, honestly. I thought AT&T was going to force Apple to nix that.

To provide a well-integrated third-party browser, Apple would need to make more APIs public. It takes time and work to design a public API. More importantly, they have to continue supporting APIs they make public. You can't have everything instantly or all the time because you don't have an infinite amount of resources available to manage it all.

This is the same reason there are other limitations of the APIs available in the beta. (And the fact that it's beta, which means "unfinished; not final".)

You make it seem like Apple wanted to stop Sun specifically, when that's pretty off-base. The infeasibility of Java on the iPhone is incidental to the design of the iPhone's sandboxing. The reality of the matter is that there are security and stability concerns that come with allowing a piece of code like Java to exist within multiple applications. Suddenly you are susceptible to problems that exist both within the shared plug-in and any code that interacts with the plug-in. A recent QuickTime vulnerability demonstrates this point perfectly. (Honestly, no one I know cares at all that Safari Touch can't use Java. No one. Not a single person. I'd wager that very few iPhone owners really care about this, and that the only people who do are the ones being REALLY VOCAL ABOUT IT on the Internet for ego and page hits.)

I actually think it's a good thing that we won't see Java on the iPhone anytime soon. Aside from stability and security concerns, memory is limited and there's no such thing as VM paging in devices like this. Java is not known for being well-tuned for power consumption or performance in web browsers. Maybe in the future, though, it'll happen.

In the happy land of rainbows and unicorns, we all have every platform and there aren't technical or design limitations. I don't live in that world. Bloggers THINK they live in that world. Therein lies the difference.

No. Someone is bound to argue with me, but:

Comcast is actively denying users specific services, and is the only ISP available for many people. Apple has designed a telephone that no one needs to buy.

Microsoft is a convicted illegal monopoly, so the government monitors what they do. No one bitches about what the cell phone manufacturers do with their devices because none of them is an illegal monopoly. I don't see anyone whining that Nokia phones have such-and-such limitation. Anyone who seriously thinks the government is going to step in and regulate the iPhone is absolutely delusional and listens to Cory Doctorow way too much.

If you don't like the iPhone SDK, don't buy an iPhone. It's as simple as that. The cell phone market is alive and well, and there are tons of alternatives.

If I were to buy, the SDK would not be an issue to me CA; I'm not a developer, though I am an engineer who likes gadgets. Having said that, I'm not terribly keen on Apple's philosophy vis-a-vis the iPhone -- the locking to one provider being the most irksome.

I'm forced to abstain because the iPhone is not available in Canada and when it is at some point, locking to a provider is moot because there's only one GSM provider in the area I live in anyway. Further, their data charges are so outrageous that I refused their data package when the trial period was over, subscribe to voice only. I already own a relatively new iPod nano (3rd gen) too, so a Touch would just be another toy I don't need; won't go there either.

A friend of mine lives in Australia and we were discussing data plans for cell providers there. He quoted me some non-unlimited plans that were pretty insane. :(

Basically, the iPhone just isn't a solid buy if you can't get an unlimited plan you can afford.

Here's Rogue Amoeba on the SDK

Overall, I thought RA's post was decent when I read it earlier. (Some of it is kinda silly, like the VoIP thing, for the reasons I stated above.) I'm going to post a reply to it later tonight, I think.

Yeah, that's the funny thing about Apple's PR isn't it? Highlight the positive, deny the negative. Apple is really big into secrets as well. But I think I agree with you on this point. They need to be far more clear on why they are doing what they are doing. Most people tend to stop whining if they are given a good reason, and those who don't stop whining can be safetly ignored ;).

Please direct me to any company's PR that doesn't preach the positive and downplay the negative. ;)

Truly. I'd even take it a step further and say "direct me to any entity that doesn't preach the positive and downplay the negative."

Who said Sun was making a browser? Couldn't they develop a plug-in to enable Java applets in Safari, or as separate apps? And about the resource hog thing, Sun already has a version of mobile Java, so that shouldn't be an issue. I think.

But I wonder what will happen with Flash. A lot of people were complaining about Flash not being available on the iPhone. However, I think people are relying on Flash too much. Mostly all interactive content on the web is in Flash.

The two sentences are talking about separate items. Reread it, then reread my post, where I discuss them separately.

I don't want to see flash on the iPhone/iTouch. I actually like not being badgered by those stupid flash ads.

The problem with this rather universal approach, however, is that customers (and voters, for that matter, because politicos are the biggest sinners), gradually become inured to the perpetual false positive message which they quite rightly regard as spin. When was the last time you believed an ad or something a politician said?

I was discussing this exact subject with a CEO yesterday (who happens to be my father in law, so I was cheating.) He started a company called InsureQuote, which was doing just grand for about 20 years until the tech bubble burst. Not that any of that matters now.

The point is that he has a lot of experience in PR, and is pretty much of the same opinion. When companies are completely honest these days we usually assume that something has gone horribly wrong. But, he did comment that honesty can be achieved if you have been bluntly honest from the beginning. I.e., you have to create your own "honesty paradigm" in order to be honest in todays world.

Not too long ago, I sent a crash report to an indie developer and received a response that I really respected: "It's a bug, and I'm damned if I can find it". Refreshing.