Editorial note: This is a guest blog post, written by my friend Thomas Hall, regarding his thoughts on what the iPhone SDK means for him. He and I have been Windows Mobile and Palm enthusiasts for a long time, but now we both are thinking we could migrate to iPhone-only. Anyway, I don’t want to steal Thomas’ thunder, but just wanted to take a moment to thank him for writing this and to encourage you to chime in with your thoughts in the comments.
I am excited about the iPhone SDK announcement. The iPhone SDK makes it relatively easy to make feature-rich programs for a mobile platform. Other development platforms do not make it as easy to create the UI or the programming language or APIs were too restrictive. But, that’s not why I’m excited.
Being a Palm user since the Pilot 5000, I went to a Treo and then Windows Mobile, Symbian (S60 and UIQ), and then the BlackBerry, trying to find the “perfect” platform. The iPhone was interesting to me, but not as a primary device, as it lacked support for third-party applications. That had always been the great allure of the Palm. There were so many apps on it that you could find almost anything.
Currently, I use a combination of a BlackBerry and a Windows Mobile device because there just aren’t enough of my favorite applications on the BlackBerry yet. The tipping point in my move from Palm to the Windows Mobile/BlackBerry combination was that enough of my favorite software had been ported over to Windows Mobile or I found decent equivalents.
So the iPhone is now a possibility for me as my only mobile device. Why? Because the SDK means that developers will port some of the third-party applications that I have been a loyal user of over the years. Here are some examples of items I’ve used on the Palm and Windows Mobile:
- Astraware games (Sudoku, Bejeweled)
- Chess Genius or PocketChess
- eReader
- eWallet
- ListPro
- Mobipocket Reader
- PhatNotes
- SplashID
- SplashShopper
- Secret!
So, that’s not a long list, but the other apps are minor or are replaced by features native to the device itself, or that have some different equivalent that is platform-specific (a great example of this is PhatNotes). Generally, you can categorize the list above into the following main categories: Games, Productivity, eBook Readers, and Security.
Looking at that list above, I decided to go see what has been said now that the iPhone SDK has been released, and I am VERY pleased with what I see:
So, that really makes me happy! The developers not only see how nice the SDK is and what they can do with it, but customers are asking for these programs and they’re listening. And since the SDK will allow you to run these applications natively and supported (instead of on a jailbroken device), there are going to be some amazing things released