Aside from the lack of shiny, new hardware displayed during the recent Jobs Keynote™, the most disappointing moment of the opening morning of WWDC (which stands for World Wide Developer’s Conference) had to be the announcement concernning 3rd party application development for the iPhone. Being an audience full of application developers, you could feel the excitement build as Jobs announced the innovative way they were going to allow for 3rd party application development and still keep the device secure.
You see, there is this thing called the World Wide Web. I know, I should refrain from using such technical jargon. But, this is pretty advanced stuff. On the World Wide Web (hrm, I think I will shorten it to WWW… or better yet, let me call it the Web) there are these things called web pages. These web pages have the ability to perform some basic tasks such as display static information, connect to a database to retrieve, manipulate, and store data, and… well… not a whole lot more. Teh Jobs innovative development platform for the iPhone is to allow developers to develop web sites. You see, the iPhone will ship with a full featured Safari (well, full-featured minus Flash suppport) allowing it accesss to the Web (remember kids, that’s short for World Wide Web).
So, developers can develop web applications. And, yes, the applications have access to certain phone services via Safari (like dialing phone numbers) so the web application may almost feel like a native, client application. But, as far as we know the developed 3rd party applcations … err websites will not be accessible outside of launching Safari. Kinda lame.
At this announcement, the RDF seemed to faulter. You could feel the excitement being sucked out of the auditorium. And, if you listened closely, you could even hear a cricket chirp. Oh sad day, when the iPhone SDK turns out to be a web browser.
R U SERIOUS! Argh! “Kinda Lame?” It is totally lame. My only guess is that Jobs wanted to get the iPhone out there, it’s been in development long-enough, and a full-featured SDK can come later. It’s like being in beta forever, you just can’t do it; if you want to actually make cash on your product you have to roll it out a some point, even if it does not have all the things you wanted it to have.
I think probably the big thing here was limiting access to the iphone proper, to keep the filthy hackers off of it.
And, everyone expected a locked-down device heading into WWDC. But, when Almighty Steve mentions a development solution for 3rd party developers on the iPhone during a WWDC keynote… I think we end up being a little disappointed at the solution being to develop websites.
Oh, no doubt. I mean, I think the only way to piss people off more than that would have been to say that development would have to be done on Microsoft’s XNA.
Why does I always get the impression that Jobs hates 3rd party programmers?