Apple Town Hall Recap: SDK, Third Party Apps, and More

Posted by Eric March on March 6, 2008 at 2:56 pm

It’s March 6th, a day that I’m sure many of you have Sharpied on your calendars with three big, bold, ominous letters. This would be twin to the one you marked off several weeks ago for late February and then had to scratch off angrily. Now, the wait is finally over: SDK Day has arrived as Apple’s Town Hall meeting got underway at 10:00am PST/1:00pm EST.

To kick off the morning, Steve rattled off a few iPhone stats (28% market share in Q407, 71% of mobile browser usage) and then launched straight into “iPhone in enterprise,” handing the stage over to Phil Schiller. Phil then announced a laundry list of new enterprise features that will be appearing in the next iPhone firmware version, including:

• Push E-Mail, push contacts, push calendaring, and global address book via Microsoft Exchange server through ActiveSync (swoon!)
• Cisco IPsec VPN.
• Network authentication and certificates.
• WPA2 and 802.1x protocol support.
• Enterprise security protocols.
• Remote wipe.

This is definitely some amazing stuff and a major boost to the iPhone and Touch (yes, all of this will be available on the Touch, too). Phil went on to demo connecting and receiving push events — very responsive and very cool, plus very simple to set up — as well as the remote wipe feature, in case you ever lose your phone and want to delete everything from it.

The floor was then turned over to Scott Forstall for the main event: The SDK. He blathered on about the success of web apps, then went on to get into the technical aspects of what the SDK provides: The core OS, services and media layers, The “Cocoa Touch” application framework, the OpenAL audio library, OpenGL ES graphics library, and so on. He also talked about Xcode, a source code editor with source control management, debugging, and tight integration with the iPhone and Touch that allows you to compile and run your code live, right on the device. Most of your eyes are probably glazing over right now, but for a developer, this is pretty sweet. From the look of things however, it only runs on a Mac. Ditto for Interface Builder, which he went on to discuss next, which is pretty much what it sounds like: Drag and drop and build your application’s interface. He also talks about an iPhone simulator, which simulates the entire API stack on your computer Mac. Only Mac again. No love for Wintel machines here or what? For shame, dissing your majority market like that.

Then it was demo time. A simple Hello World app was shown first, slapped together in a couple of minutes. He followed that up with a two-day app that used OpenGL ES to distort and warp pictures in your photo album. Then came the two-week app, Touch Fighter, which looks like a pretty impressive (if simple) Wing Commander-style 3D-accelerated shooter; tap to fire, navigate with the accelerometer. It gets a live frame rate of around 30FPS, which is very nice indeed.

He then explained that they called up some big-name development houses to send out a few software engineers to see what they could come up with in two weeks, despite having never worked with the SDK before. First was Electronic Arts, who showed off a much-simplified version of their forthcoming game Spore which, despite being designed in only two weeks, looks pretty fantastic!

Then it was over to Salesforce.com for their vertical sales and marketing tools, dubbed SFA. Not much of interest to see here if you’re not in the sales industry.

Next up, AOL shows off their two-week port of AIM. Yes, AOL Instant Messenger is officially on iPhone now. Not that this does much for ICQ or MSN users. Nifty features if you’re an AOL fan though; swipe to switch screens/panels and such.

Then it was over to Epocrates, a drug guide that’s already well-known on to Windows Mobile and PalmOS users.

Then it was on to none other than gaming old-timer Sega, who showed off a completely accelerometer-controlled port of Super Monkey Ball — and it’s fantastic.

Finally, Steve returns to the floor to get down to the gritty details we’re all waiting to hear about. First he introduces the App Store, a iPhone/Touch adjunct to the iTunes Music Store that will be accessible through both iTunes and right on the device, much like iTMS currently is. It will work pretty much like you would expect it to — which is to say, pretty much like iTMS already does; Featured and newly-added apps, favourite/popular picks, category browsing, searching, and so on. Apps can be purchased and downloaded in the same ways as well: Through iTunes or right on the device wirelessly over the air. It will even monitor and inform you of product updates to anything you’ve downloaded. What’s interesting here is that Steve, while showing off the App Store, selects one, mentioning, “This one’s free,” which confirms that free apps are possible.

This is where Steve gets down to brass tacks about the business end of things:

• Developers pick their own price.
• Developers get 70% of revenues right off the top, paid monthly.
• No credit card processing, marketing or hosting fees.
• No charge for free apps. Devs can write and release whatever they want, free, through the App Store.
• Developer sign-up will cost $99 — sorry, no free SDK for you. On the other hand, no charge for digital signatures, either, so I think everyone will agree that this is a much better option.
• No porn and no malicious apps will be allowed.

“Malicious” can be painted with a broad brush, so it remains to be seen if Apple will restrict distribution on apps that don’t actually do anything bad, but may have fringes of gray-area legality about them. (Emulators, for example.)

Next, Steve talked about the next iPhone firmware 2.0 update. This will be a beta release and will only be going out to “thousands of” developers so they can do their thing. The final 2.0 release will go out to all iPhone and iPod Touch users in June, and will include everything that was shown at the meeting. (I assume this means the third party apps that were shown off.)

Unfortunately, Steve mentioned that due to the difference in the way they account for the Touch, there will again be a “nominal” fee levied for the 2.0 update for iPod Touch users, so I would advise you to take another crisp $20 (or whatever they decide to charge for it — Steve stated that they had not set a price, bt do not intend on making a profit from it) and fold it away in your wallet. You’ll need it in three months.

The meeting wrapped up with about 10 minutes of press Q&A, in which it was revealed that VoIP will not be possible through the SDK via cellular, but will be allowed through WiFi, and SIM unlock software will, unsurprisingly, fall under the “malicious” umbrella, so you won’t find such things in the App Store. It was also noted that 2.0 will include parental controls that parents can use to lock their kids out of certain apps — like Safari or the App Store, presumably to safeguard against their kid racking up data charges or getting ahold of their credit card and/or iTunes account info and running up a nice tab.

That about wraps it up for the event. To sum it up: Lots of great apps on the way, an abundance of third party support, the possibility for free apps, a plethora of new enterprise features, and some cool freebies with the June release of firmware 2.0. I’m very excited to see what comes out of this; the business model looks exceptionally good on both sides of the fence, with the developers having pretty well carte blanche to write something good as long as it’s not malicious and doesn’t threaten revenue streams (i.e. unlocking), and the users being able to get free software out of the deal, should developers choose to release their stuff that way.

I expect that we’ll start seeing previews and sneak peeks of forthcoming apps pretty soon, so I am sure there will be plenty of material to whet your collective appetite while we wait for June to roll in.

(Source: Engadget)

Related Stories:

• March 6, 2008 -- Town Hall Analysis: Some Thoughts
• March 23, 2008 -- First Glimpse of the App Store?
• March 21, 2008 -- Google’s SDK Hearts iPhone SDK
• March 21, 2008 -- Apple’s Music Is Where They’d Not Like You To Touch
• March 11, 2008 -- Rogue Amoeba Puts SDK Under Microscope

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Posted in Apple Event, Firmware Related, Gaming Related, News Related, SDK