Tomorrow is the “big day” – Apple will be holding an event at their campus Town Hall at 10 A.M. PST (that means 1 P.M. for me) to announce their “software roadmap” for the iPhone regarding the official SDK and various enterprise features. I could bloviate on and on about the various rumors of what said announcement will bring, but I am sure that if you are interested in that information, there are plenty of better sources for it.
That said, I would like to talk about what I want to see from the official SDK. As a relative beginner to programming and a complete novice at Objective-C, I am obviously not the best source of insight into the wants and needs of the developer community. However, speaking as a hobbyist looking to dip his toes in the water, I would really like to see:
- Some form of Interface Builder for the iPhone: IB is an incredible asset for Mac OS X developers. Not only does it make designing a program’s UI drop-dead simple, but it also gives the programmer a surprisingly large amount of power even before they start writing a single line of code. For some proof of this, look at Scott Stevenson’s tutorials on learning Cocoa: The first tutorial doesn’t even involve any code at all, but rather is entirely created in IB. Similarly, an IB for Mobile OS X would be a huge boon to developers. Currently under the unofficial SDK used by jailbreakers, all interface elements need to be declared in code, making UI design slow and tedious. If no version of IB is announced as part of the SDK, expect app rollout to take a bit longer.
-Deployment and distribution of applications via iTunes: Many developers are against the idea of Apple forcing applications to be vetted and sold through the iTunes Store, but as an amateur developer with minimal resources, it is a dream-come-true. By taking this approach, Apple is essentially offering developers hosting, bottomless bandwidth, and promotion on the iTunes Store, a web page that sells more than 5 million items a day, all for (likely) a small cut of the sale price.
As an independent developer, I would have to spend a great deal just to get a mediocre hosting and bandwidth package together on my own. If my app suddenly became massively popular, I would be suffocated by the immense bandwidth requirements. By requiring sale of apps through iTunes, Apple is democratizing the third-party software marketplace – suddenly, a little guy like myself can compete with giants like Omni Group (and judging by this comment, I will be…), and stand a great chance of being successful.
The ideal terms for such a system would be Apple not requiring any fees upfront, but rather just taking 10-15% of an app’s revenue through the store. While some will cry murder at such a rate, for the independent developer, it is a steal compared to finding hosting of one’s own, especially for lower-priced apps. If I wanted to put out AutoPilot and had to host a site and pay hosting and bandwidth charges, I would have to charge 4-5 times what I want to just to break even. Currently, the plan is to price AutoPilot at $5-10, based on what Apple announces tomorrow and market demand, which seems to be pretty massive according to Macworld. At that price point, even with larger, more well-known competitors, I can still be highly successful in my chosen market. However, if I had to pay for all of these services on my own, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
- Custom sync conduit support on both Mac & PC: Sync should be easy enough to manage on the Mac side, as long as I am allowed to manipulate the iPhone’s Calendar Store directly – it should all just get carried over via iSync when the iPhone is next connected to iTunes. The PC side, however, will be a whole other can of worms (Outlook = yuck, writing an Outlook plug-in = BLECCH). If Apple enables developers to write custom sync scripts that hook directly into iTunes, it will make my life a lot easier, although how they would manage the installation of these eludes me at the moment. (Would they install when you buy an app? What if you use multiple computers to sync with the iPhone (as I do, calendars/bookmarks/pictures on my Mac, music/movies/TV shows on my PC)?)
- Rollout to consumers in some form BEFORE WWDC: Various rumors are saying that the kit isn’t ready yet, and anything that will be put out tomorrow will either be a developers-only beta/alpha of the SDK, or a rather barebones kit rolled out to the world with more advanced functionality coming later on. As a developer, I would greatly prefer to see the latter, especially given the nature of my app – I don’t need a whole bunch of whiz-bang features to develop the 1.0 version of my app, although I can certainly see places to add them on in the future. I would rather see some form of third-party app support being placed in consumers’ hands sooner rather than later.
I will be following tomorrow’s announcement very closely (fortunately, I’ll be out of class when it starts, so I won’t have to sneak peeks at my iPod touch every 2 minutes just to see what’s going on), and I will post a follow-up tomorrow evening outlining a roadmap of my own for the development of AutoPilot. As both a developer and a future user of AP, trust me when I say I am itching to get started on this project, and will share concept pictures and demo screencasts as soon as humanly possible.
Until tomorrow,
- Bill Kline, Developer, AutoPilot
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