What is the iPhone SDK?
The iPhone SDK is a software development kit that will allow third parties to create applications that can run directly on the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The kit is significant because Apple can’t possibly anticipate, nor produce, all the applications that people might want to use on an iPhone. And some of those applications will convince people who weren’t sure about the iPhone to buy it.
The questions: will the iPhone go 3G, will it have VoIP, what will the games look like, when will there be a software update, what are the ramifications of the SDK release, what of the promises enterprise features? Patience my friends all will be revealed.
Everyone was expecting a mention of the 3G iPhone but guess what – nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. In seems like it will be June now before the most wanted feature finds it’s way into your beloved device.
No 3G is a bummer but Steve gave his imperial nod today to allow VoIP through WiFi if someone develops it. Handy if you are chewing through your minutes and are inundated with WiFi hotspots to tap into.
Like games? EA and Sega have signed on get involved in games for the iPhone using both the multitouch and accelerometer features. Early titles to get the Apple treatment will be Super Monkey Ball and Spore.
That’s all great but when will I get my hands on any of this? After all these announcements comes the big downer. Though the announcements have all been made today users won’t be able to get any of these features until the iPhone 2.0 software update in June. Meanwhile developers will be testing their applications and hackers no doubt cutting a whole in the heart of the beast.
Want to get involved and download the SDK and build your own application? You’ll need Mac Os X Leopard, An Intel-based Mac, Xcode, a free Apple iPhone developer account and the SDK itself downloadable here.
Apple also made these tools available for developers:
Cocoa Touch - Multi-touch events, Multi-touch controls, Acceleromter, View Hierarchy, Localization, Alerts, Web View, People Picker, Image Picker, Camera
Media - Core Audio, OpenAL, Audio Mixing, Audio Recording, Video Playback, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PDS Quartz, Core Animation, Embedded OpenGL
Core Services - Collections, Address Book, Networking, File access, SQLite, Core Location, Net Services Threading, Preferences, URL utilities
Core OS - OS X Kernel, BSD TCP/IP, Sockets, Power Management, Keychain, Certificates, File System, Lib System, Security, Bonjour
A software iPhone emulator for Mac OS X is provided to help with development.
What about the Enterprise features? Well there’s a bunch of them, but sadly these once again will have to wait until the software update in June:
- Push calendar

- Push contacts

- Global address list

- Certificates and Identities

- Push email

- Cisco IPsec VPN

- WPA2 / 802.1x

- Enforced security policies

- Device configuration

- Remote wipe

- Active Sync and Microsoft Exchange support
Who said no news is good news? You can watch the whole presentation here.