decidedlyodd

The first public beta of the iPhone SDK came out earlier today and of course I had to download it. Unfortunately, it was 2.1GB and took something like 4 hours. In the interim, I watched a movie and spent some time reading about the feature set of the SDK. It’s been a few years since I last did any Cocoa development (when I was in grad school) so it took a slight refresher on the idiosyncrasies of Objective C and Cocoaey goodness. I must say on first glance it looks pretty slick. Support for audio, video, networking, access to a phone’s contact list are all important and expected. The real highlights are certainly access to the accelerometer and the touch interface. I’ve already got a couple ideas of personal projects I want to try out when I get the chance.

Anyhow, after downloading it and installing it (some 5 or 6 hours later), I started to play around with it by compiling the dummy application. Turns out you can’t actually push anything onto a device (not even for debugging) unless you pony up $99 to Apple for a developer’s certificate. Oh and there’s a mysterious waiting list to get one at this time (select few will be selected at some point in the indeterminate future to participate at first / don’t call us we’ll call you type stuff). Still, it is possible to start writing apps right now against the simulator which is something I suppose. Hopefully, more will be announced soon with regard to getting something onto a device.

I haven’t learned a new language or API probably since I needed to do some C#/.NET stuff at work a while back. That wasn’t even really all that exciting and new since I’d done a lot of Java before years ago. So it’ll be neat to tinker around with a new hobby platform.

Eek, it’s late and I should get to bed. This is what happens when I find myself interested and passionate about some new piece of technology though I suppose.