No third party apps for the iPhone/iPod?
I read something incredibly disappointing this evening.
Apple has worked out deals for 3rd-party games to run on iPod. I wouldn't be surprised if similar arrangements might show up for iPhone. What you are unlikely ever to see are publicly available SDK's so anybody can write code and users can download from applications from anyone anywhere to install themselves. The iPod line of products are not general purpose computers. What little I know about how they're engineered tells me they are almost certainly never going to be.
Right now it's just dorks checking their email with Blackberries, but as one of those dorks it seems pretty clear that mobile computing / personal computing / smart phones are on the verge of a massive explosion into the mainstream. It's useful to run software on compact personal computing devices for the same reason that laptops are more useful than desktops. A standard computing and networking device that everyone carries with them will become as big a deal this century as the standard computing device that migrated from university computing clusters to private houses last century for the same reason: because access and convenience is good. The computer you've got with you is always better than the computer you can't get to.
Sooner or later somebody's going to get mobile computing right enough to make mass adoption happen. Whoever does this gets the chance to become the de facto standard in the mobile computing environment for the forseeable future the way DOS/Windows became, for better or worse, the de facto standard for the desktop computing environment. Apple has smart programmers, but no single company can fill its user's needs as well as the complex SDK/library/developer ecosystem that emerges from a mature development environment and as versatile as AJAX is "a web page" can't be the solution to every problem.
"...the iPhone is not just a phone, it is a platform for developing applications, services and accessories. The more iPhones sold, the bigger the ecosystem around it, and the more that is developed that attracts and retains customers." -The apparently mistaken New York Times
With decent hardware running a versatile operating system it seemed like the iPhone was becoming that standard, but if Apple are content with making a zillion dollars off this decade's equivalent of the Walkman that decision seems incredibly shortsighted to me. Maybe as the employee of a company that made a zillion dollars off the last decade's equivalent of the Walkman, a company that's spent the last several years using DRM and unnecessarily crippled hardware to force its customers to do what we wish they'd do rather than what they wanted to do and in the process becoming one of the most-loathed organizations in the world makes this mistake more obvious to me than it does to most people.
Apple has worked out deals for 3rd-party games to run on iPod. I wouldn't be surprised if similar arrangements might show up for iPhone. What you are unlikely ever to see are publicly available SDK's so anybody can write code and users can download from applications from anyone anywhere to install themselves. The iPod line of products are not general purpose computers. What little I know about how they're engineered tells me they are almost certainly never going to be.
Right now it's just dorks checking their email with Blackberries, but as one of those dorks it seems pretty clear that mobile computing / personal computing / smart phones are on the verge of a massive explosion into the mainstream. It's useful to run software on compact personal computing devices for the same reason that laptops are more useful than desktops. A standard computing and networking device that everyone carries with them will become as big a deal this century as the standard computing device that migrated from university computing clusters to private houses last century for the same reason: because access and convenience is good. The computer you've got with you is always better than the computer you can't get to.
Sooner or later somebody's going to get mobile computing right enough to make mass adoption happen. Whoever does this gets the chance to become the de facto standard in the mobile computing environment for the forseeable future the way DOS/Windows became, for better or worse, the de facto standard for the desktop computing environment. Apple has smart programmers, but no single company can fill its user's needs as well as the complex SDK/library/developer ecosystem that emerges from a mature development environment and as versatile as AJAX is "a web page" can't be the solution to every problem.
"...the iPhone is not just a phone, it is a platform for developing applications, services and accessories. The more iPhones sold, the bigger the ecosystem around it, and the more that is developed that attracts and retains customers." -The apparently mistaken New York Times
With decent hardware running a versatile operating system it seemed like the iPhone was becoming that standard, but if Apple are content with making a zillion dollars off this decade's equivalent of the Walkman that decision seems incredibly shortsighted to me. Maybe as the employee of a company that made a zillion dollars off the last decade's equivalent of the Walkman, a company that's spent the last several years using DRM and unnecessarily crippled hardware to force its customers to do what we wish they'd do rather than what they wanted to do and in the process becoming one of the most-loathed organizations in the world makes this mistake more obvious to me than it does to most people.