iPhone Open Application Development

Preface

So, you want to write applications for the iPhone. The first thing you should know is that the iPhone is by and large a closed device, and Apple has taken steps to lock users out of the operating system. This hasn't stopped people. In October 2007, Apple announced in an earnings statement that over 250,000 units had been sold with the intent of unlocking them for use on other networks. Within the first month of v1.1's software release, Nicholas Penree's jailbreakme.com site logged over one million units that were freed to run third-party applications. Sites hosting iPhone cracking tools have reported record traffic, and even Apple's own employees traipse around the Genius Bar touting their hacked devices. Well-respected hackers joined the effort to crack the iPhone, and once in, realized it's just as elegant on the inside—a well-planned mobile platform well worth developing applications on. Within a few months, a free, open source (http://open-source.org) compiler for building iPhone applications was released—not by Apple, but by the open source community. Today, full-featured iPhone applications are ubiquitous. And all of this was accomplished on a device that was intended to be closed.

Apple finally woke up to the fact that developers were not satisfied with Safari-based applications. In late 2007, they announced an SDK for the iPhone to be released the first quarter of 2008, but as of the time of this writing, we don't know what the availability will be, or what restrictions ...