Apple’s SDK Pushes Mobile’s Move Towards Openness

All the buzz at this year’s SXSWi—besides the Zuckerberg/Lacy incident—was Apple’s announcement of the iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit). After March 6th, every developer there was devising killer iPhone apps on a cocktail napkin (ok, a MacBook Air).

The festival was a microcosm of the development community at large. Apple has reported that in the first four days, more than 100,000 iPhone developers have downloaded the iPhone SDK with AOL, Electronic Arts, Epocrates, salesforce.com and Sega working around the clock to build some of the first apps.

So what exactly does the SDK contain? Gizmodo boiled down the specs better than we could (tried… failed):

• Apple combined mouse and keyboard Cocoa with our multitouch knowledge to build Cocoa touch for the iPhone SDK.
• Core OS has the OS X Kernel, Lib System, BSD TCP/IP, Sockets, Security, Power Mgmt, Keychain, Certificates, File System, Bonjour
• Took everything we knew about creating stuff with Cocoa and everything about a touch API for iPhone to build Cocoa Touch
• Cocoa is great, but based on mouse & keyboard input
• Used all of the above (except Cocoa) for iPhone OS
• Cocoa, Media, Core Services, CoreOS
• Has all audio/video capabilities: Core Audio, OpenAL, Audio Mixing, Audio Recording, Video Playback, JPG/PNG/TIFF, PDF, Quartz (2D) Core Animation, OpenGL ES
• “The Media layer is everything you’d expect from Apple”
• Also include SQLite, Core Location
• Cocoa Touch: Multi-Touch events/controls, Accelerometer, View Hierarchy, Localization, Alerts, Web View, People Picker, Image Picker, Camera
• Everything is hardware accelerated for performance and long battery life
• OpenGL ES is the embedded version of OpenGL, “absolute screamer” on the iPhone
• Started there and enhanced it to work with the iPhone
• Xcode is our dev environment and what we use to build everything for Mac OS X
• “This is the architecture of the iPhone OS. It is the most advanced platform out there for mobile devices. We are YEARS ahead of any other platform for mobile devices.”
• Integrated documentation, “Shipping a lot of great documentation with the SDK, and you can access it within the software”
• Project management, integrated source control
• Xcode will now code complete for the APIs in the SDK
• Can connect to iPhone like the remote debugger and see live performance of your app on your Mac from the iPhone
• Instruments: “Comprehensive suite of performance analysis tools”
• Do code connections within Interface Builder, connect it right to the code
• All the controls from Cocoa Touch are built right into Interface Builder
• Interface Builder: “Makes building your user interface as simple as drag-and-drop”
• Remote debugger–plug in your iPhone, run it on the iPhone live, but debug from the Mac
• Run your iPhone app in the simulator on your Mac, works great side-by-side with Xcode
• Introducing brand new iPhone dev tool: iPhone Simulator
• See peaks and valleys, realtime data, timeline view, multiple data tracks

Basically, what you need to know is that third-party developers can know create iPhone apps and sell them on iTunes. As the mobile industry slowly lurches towards openness, Apple’s move both follows suite and ups the ante. Perhaps in response, AT&T just launched a new Web site called devCentral that provides information for third-party developers to create apps for its network. According to MocoNews:

The site, which publishes guidelines on how to create applications for its network, curiously comes just a week before Verizon Wireless targets developers at an Open Development Device Conference in New York, and a week after Apple released its SDK, allowing developers to create apps for the iPhone. All of the moves are attempts to woo developers, who may create the next killer app that will drive demand for new phones and more network usage.

Game: on.

iPhone SDK

AT&T’s devCentral