Apple Releases iPhone SDK, Demos Spore, Instant Messaging

Thursday March 6, 2008 9:28 am PST by Arnold Kim

During the iPhone SDK event today, Apple announced that they would be releasing to developers the same APIs and Tools that they use to create iPhone apps.

Based on existing Mac OS X technologies, the SDK provides a robust package of tools for developers to use to develop iPhone native applications. The SDK is broken down into the following sets:

Cocoa Touch - Multi-touch events, Multi-touch controls, Acceleromter, View Hierarchy, Localization, Alerts, Web View, People Picker, Image Picker, Camera
Media - Core Audio, OpenAL, Audio Mixing, Audio Recording, Video Playback, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PDS Quartz, Core Animation, Embedded OpenGL
Core Services - Collections, Address Book, Networking, File access, SQLite, Core Location, Net Services Threading, Preferences, URL utilities
Core OS - OS X Kernel, BSD TCP/IP, Sockets, Power Management, Keychain, Certificates, File System, Lib System, Security, Bonjour

A software iPhone emulator for Mac OS X is provided to help with development.

Apple wrote a couple of quick demo apps, and also invited software developers to try to see what they could come up with in 2 weeks. EA demoed Spore for the iPhone, with 18 levels, an editor and accelerometer controls:

Also demoed:

- Epocrates - popular drug reference application for physicians.
- Salesforce.com
- AOL AIM (instant messaging client)
- SEGA's Super Monkey Ball

Native iPhone apps will be distributed through the iTunes App Store, with wireless downloads. Developers pick the price, and get 70% of revenue. The 70% will be paid out to developers monthly, and there are no other recurring fees. The iTunes App Store will handle over the air updates to your applications. Developers of free applications will not be charged for Apple to deliver their applications through iTunes.

All this will come with the iPhone 2.0 update, in beta today going to thousands of developers. Customers will get it in June as a free software update to iPhone users. Meanwhile, iPod Touch users will be charged a small fee due to accounting issues.

The SDK will be available for free public download, but there is a $99/year fee in order to publish applications to the iTunes App Store.

Update: Apple has said they will not restrict VOIP (voice over IP) applications that use Wifi, but will not allow VOIP applications that use cellular networks.