SDK Roundup

At the official SDK release/'roadmap' yesterday, we got much more than we had expected. As well as a large press release entailing the inner workings and functions of the SDK (a little over-complex to post), we got live demo's and the tantalising prospect of gaming on the iPhone. However, the story causing the most uproar at the moment is the announced release of Spore on the iPhone (September release date). The game was demoed, and alongside the other games on show (including Super Monkey Ball), Spore made good use of the technology available, using the accelerometer to manipulate the environment.

Further announcements included Enterprise apps and Apple's new Exchange server accomodation- head over to Apple Insider for the complete story. There was also the announcement that Apple would be restricting VOIP (Voice Over IP) programs that use cellular networks, but would allow those that use Wi-Fi; an interesting prospect.
Native iPhone applications are to be downloaded direct from the iTunes store, and developers will receive a princely 70% of the revenue in monthly installments.

The SDK is available for developers to download now on the Apple website (which is slow due to demand), including a nice iPhone software emulator to aid with the process. However, a $99 membership fee must be paid in order to post applications direct to the iTunes store. The full version (this is only a beta) will be released in June to all iPhone owners, although iPod Touch users must pay a premium.

Reading about this is great, but nothing beats watching Steve do his thing. Head over to the Apple site for a peek.

For those interested in the minutae, Mac Rumors broke down the SDK into four digestable sections:

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

Written by Will on March 7th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on iPhone and Steve Jobs and Apple and iPod Touch and SDK and Event and Developers and Software Development Kit and 6th March and Roadmap.