Apple Announces SDK for iPhone

Apple seems to be going all-out with its super-popular product, the iPhone. The latest announcement on Wednesday from Steve Jobs’ company is about the plans to come up with a software development kit for the phone within spring next year, an announcement that has gone down really well with the software industry.

Apple said developers could have the complete software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone by February 2008. The announcement comes after months of effort the company put in towards getting developers to come up with a fresh approach to developing applications on the iPhone using Internet-based applications.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, in a message in the Apple Hot News Section, the company was trying to get the proverbial two birds with one stone – create for developers an open platform while ensuring iPhone users were safe from Trojans, viruses, and other such harmful elements.

Jobs said doing these two things at the same time would be quite tough. The popularity of the iPhone automatically makes it a high profile target that people would malicious intent would love to attack.

There is a high sense of anticipation among developers about the new SDK Apple is going to provide, especially after Apple made the announcement Wednesday. Developers say that with the SDK, the iPhone has moved to higher ground. From being just a phone with multiple functionalities, it would now be a complete platform in itself.

Daniel Jalkut, founder of Red Sweater Software and a Mac programmer himself, said the entire community of developers within the software industry seemed delighted and eagerly awaiting the toolkit. As Alex Schaefer, the lead programmer for an instant messaging application of iPhone, Apollo, put it, big things were due with the release of the SDK.

Schaefer said the iPhone and iPod Touch reflected what a competitor, Microsoft, was thinking of when it announced the UMPC concept. The UMPC is a small portable device that has all the powers of a standard desktop. He said the iPhone matched up to all this, and that third party applications are what would make iPhone cool long after the initially euphoria associated with an exciting new product died down.

While the entire developer community is keyed up about the SDK Apple announced, there is no indication what plans, if any, other software majors may have for the iPhone. Majors like Microsoft, Adobe, and even Apple itself has turned down requests for further comments on the subject.

Analysts have their own take on the whole situation. Terming the Apple’s SDK announcement the logical thing to happen and probably ‘inevitable’, an analyst at Creative Strategies, Tim Barajin, said this did not mean the end of the road for web applications.

Another analyst, Chris Messina, who is an advocate of open source and also the co-organizer of iPhoneDevCamp, said the world was not yet ready for web applications, but this did not mean they were a failed experiment. Messina said Apple’s SDK announcement was a definite pointer in this direction. All we can do is possibly wait, Messina said.