Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz » Developer talks of iPhone SDK pluses and a few minuses

March 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Developer talks of iPhone SDK pluses and a few minuses

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Antonio Rodriguez, former CEO of Tabblo, a photo sharing site since acquired by HP and who is now the general manager of HP publishing services was so excited about the SDK he called me from the airport between flights.

I interviewed Rodriguez before the release of the SDK and he was a bit skeptical at the time of how much Apple would give to developers.

[ Get the whole scoop on the iPhone SDK, how to make the iPhone fit in the enterprise, and the latest security issues that the popular smartphone raises in InfoWorld's special report. ]

Rodriguez was absolutely ecstatic about most of what the SDK offers, but he also had some reservations that he hopes will be fixed with a little pressure on Apple from the developer community.

Rodriguez called Cocoa Touch, the iPhone version of Cocoa for the Mac desktop, the best library for developing user interface stuff he has ever seen in his career as a developer.

"It is the crown jewel of the iPhone SDK," Rodriguez told me.

On the down side, Rodriguez’s major gripe is that you can’t run applications in the background from the emulator. A lot of social networking applications suffer from that, and so if you want to run a location-based service and have it check for something every 10 minutes, you would have to restart it every 10 minutes.

"It’s kind of a bummer. They will have to yield to developer pressure and fix that," Rodriguez said.

As a developer, however, Rodriguez said the revenue model -- Apple gets 30 percent, the developer 70 percent -- is not bad. But the real issue is the distribution model. "They need to have alternative distribution paths," he said

For example, HP uses an enterprise application for hardware procurement. HP would never put that application in the iTunes store, Rodriguez said, which at present is the only way to distribute an iPhone application. So even the smallest application that you would want to distribute only over a LAN must go through the store.

I’ve heard this from other developers as well, and in fact, Apple said that it is working on creating an alternative distribution path for the enterprise.

Rodriguez’s plane was boarding, but I would have to say if he represents in any way how other developers feel about what Apple is giving them, you are going to see some amazing applications and most likely future sales of the iPhone skyrocket for consumers and business users.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on March 7, 2008 03:22 PM

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