Rogue Amoeba Divided on Dev Experience, Reveal iPhone Plans

by Eric March on April 8, 2008 at 10:31 pm

Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis took some time out of his busy schedule of development, rebellion, and binary fission to have a Cover It Live chat on TUAW with Erica and the gang late this morning on the topic of the love/hate relationship of developing third party software with the iPhone SDK and what the folks at RA are up to.

In general, with regards to iPhone development, it was very much a case of briefly touching on the same points expounded upon in their in-depth analysis of the SDK and the ramifications of its legal restrictions a month ago. They love the development environment, but hate the sometimes unreasonable prohibitions against background apps, access to the user’s music library, and so on — a common complaint amongst application developers. (Not so much with game developers for obvious reasons.)

Of particular interest were their development plans for the iPhone. Currently on the roadmap will be versions of their Mac applications, Airfoil Speakers, which will let you stream audio content over WiFi to your iPhone or Touch, and their main project, Radioshift Touch, which will let you stream tens of thousands of Internet radio stations over WiFi or EDGE to your device. (Unlike the Mac version, the Touch/iPhone version will not have recording capabilities.) There was also brief talk about AudioHijack, but if it made an appearance on the iPhone, it would be a voice recorder only, and they just aren’t sure if there’s much demand for that.

Overall, Rogue Amoeba do seem to have at least a pair of iPhone-related projects on their plate for the summer, so anyone looking for ways to stream audio to their device or stream a ton of Internet radio stations can definitely look forward to some output from this team of clever protozoon.

Have a read over the full transcript of the chat in the source link below.

(Source: TUAW)