So a lot of Mac developers are pissed because the iPhone SDK announced yesterday will actually be Web-based — i.e. the idea is that you build Web applications if you want to do iPhone apps. I fail to see what’s wrong with this, because Safari will allow interaction with the iPhone’s features — you can make calls, access contacts etc. What more could one ask for?
Had Apple chosen to build a ‘real’ SDK (i.e. using Objective C/Cocoa), only Mac developers would have been able to build iPhone applications — this way, and with the accompanying release of Safari for Windows, there are millions of developers who can (and will) build them.
I couldn’t tell from the keynote whether the iphone would allow disconnected access to those web apps, but I strongly suspect not. Cingular’s network is OK, but not great and not available everywhere. It would be nice if there were a way to “download” a web app onto the phone, but obviously that implies a bunch of things (e.g., running everything that was on the web server on the phone) that are unlikely to happen. Without this, though, no network == no application.