Developers see possibilities in iPhone apps
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Users eager to get their hands on an iPhone may have June 29 circled on their calendars to mark the mobile device&#8217;s announced ship date.
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Blog: An exhaustive test of the iPhone has produced several bugs that will require fixes, but few that will cause problems with common tasks.
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Blog: iPhoneDevCamp rolls into San Francisco this weekend, where geeks galore will dream up new applications for the recently released combination iPod and cell phone.
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As the engine of iPhone hype gears up for its final power thrust, discussions about the new device range from how many units it will sell to how developers can cash in with widgets to how its iPod-like features might cannibalize iPod sales.
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With iPhone, Apple's Steve Jobs applied his revolution-by-design mind to cell phones. An inside look at innovation in action
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Apple boss Steve Jobs says outside developers will now be allowed to make add-on software for the iPhone.
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InfoWorld - No one ever said Apple marketers weren&#39;t clever. So if they wanted to start a firestorm of ISVs developing applications for the iPhone, how better to do that than to make development as simple as possible with the least barriers?
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Third-party ringtone creators for the iPhone believe there's a viable market for their software.
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When it begins shipping on June 29, the revolutionary iPhone will run applications created with Web 2.0 Internet standards Apple today announced that developers can create Web 2.0 applications that look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone and that can seamlessly access iPhoneâs services. That includes making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps. Third-party applications created using Web 2.0 standards can extend iPhoneâs capabilities without compromising its reliability or security.
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Apple Inc.  will allow  independent developers to write applications for its upcoming  iPhone by tapping into the device's built-in Web browser, Chief  Executive Steve Jobs said on Monday.
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I'm a lady! IBM and SAS Institute might not seem obvious sources of information for those interested in developing iPhone web applications, but - such is the appeal of Apple's little wonder and its perceived applicability to business users - that these hoary old giants are getting in on the act.â¦
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SAN JOSE, Calif. - In an apparent about-face, Apple Inc. will allow third-party applications to work directly on the iPhone, chief executive Steve Jobs said in a posting on the company's website yesterday.
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Apple's plan to release a software kit that lets people create legitimate add-ons for the iPhone could make the device appeal to an even wider audience.
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Just a week after the launch of Apple's much hyped gadget, Web developers gather for iPhoneDevCamp and in a weekend come up with 50 new iPhone apps.
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According to David Needle , customers of NetSuiteâs âon-demand, integrated business management applicationsâ are already using iPhone to take advantage of its web-based services. It was âApple putting Safari on the iPhone [that] made it a simple processâ for the company to extend service to iPhone customers, says Sean Rollings, NetSuiteâs senior director of product marketing. Using the built-in Safari browser, says Rollings, â âsalespeople will be able to get a lot of their work done on an iPhone. You have the ability to check inventory for the availability of a product and get an answer in real time.ââ
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Some developers were underwhelmed with Steve Jobs' announcement that iPhone was open to creation of of Web 2.0 applications.
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(InfoWorld) - No one ever said Apple marketers weren't clever. So if they wanted to start a firestorm of ISVs developing applications for the iPhone, how better to do that than to make development as simple as possible with the least barriers? Nevertheless, until we hear more details from Apple about the way in which applications are handled on the iPhone, we won't know how clever Apple really is. At WWDC07, Jobs promised that there will be a "new way to create applications for the iPhone" due mainly to the fact that it uses the full Safari browser engine. But a lot of developers are disappointed with what Apple is offering. "Web-based apps are cool for a lot of things. But what people were looking forward to was to to let them develop native applications," said Anthony MeadowÂ , president of Bear River AssociatesÂ , an ISV for mobile applications Without native access to facilities, you don't have storage or sharing of information between applications, or reading and writing from address book and iCal. "There is not any easy way to do that with a Web-based application," said Meadow. Overall, Meadow was not impressed. Although he admitted it is really not very clear what Apple intends. But, he added, "If they don't intend to have access, they should just tell us." Ken Dulaney, the senior mobile analyst with Gartner says Apple's Web 2.0 solution is likely to be similar to what RIM does now. "It avoids having to put code down on the device," Says Dulaney, which in turn protects it from crashing due to outside influences. On RIM devices, the application is rendered on the server side, and the cache in the browser reformats it and pushes it down to the device. "The code is only resident briefly on the device," Dulaney said. Similar technology is also used by device manufacturers using mobile Linux from MontaVista. Now resident on tens of millions of cell phones, the MontaVista design uses a "computing peer" design, Linux on the server and on the phone, giving developers the flexibility of partitioning an application on the client side and server side. An ISV can put a heavy load on the phone or a light one, says Jim Ready, CTO and founder of MontaVista. "Linux on the phone is every bit as capable as Linux on the server," said Ready. Certainly this supports similar statements from Jobs about Safari on the desktop and Safari on the iPhone. However, like Meadow at Bear River, Ready has some reservations about the future capabilities or the richness of applications running on the iPhone. When applications are developed solely using an "abstracted" development environment that doesn't talk to the lower layers of the device, such as the hardware and middleware, there is a dividing line in terms of the capabilities of the application. "Take video frame rates. The reason you back out of an abstracted environment is because you pay for the abstraction in performance. It is a tradeoff," said Ready. And not only for performance -- developers also need to write native applications that get down closer to access the hardware and the middleware for size and control reasons, as well, although Meadow doesn't see access to hardware as a major problem. "There is a handful of people that care about writing to the chips. It is possibly useful for really high performance graphic drivers and low level networking code," he says. So where does that leave gamers and business users whose need for rich network applications might be problematic on the iPhone? Unfortunately, until the full story is known, it is hard to tell what the software limitations of the iPhone will be. Certainly, if Apple wants the device to be a great mobile gaming system for use by millions of road warriors during those long waits at the airport, it will have to address the issue of how to get developers to write applications native to both the hardware and middleware. In business as well, cell phones are currently being used with customized software, such as bar code and RFID readers. "You can't do that with a browser interface," says Jerry Panagrossi, vice present of U.S. Operations for Symbian. "You need something more in-depth that can talk to IBM or Oracle middleware using native APIs for a richer experience." Jim Ready at MontaVista sums it up when he says keeping the development environment as simple as possible will facilitate the largest amount of applications. As far as the capabilities of those applications Ready says, "There are limits, but sometimes it's okay that there are limits."