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Filed under: Developer, Apple, iPhone

iPhone open SDK coming after all?


When Apple introduced the iPhone at this year's Macworld Expo, there was a great sigh of disappointment when Steve Jobs informed his developer community that only web-based applications would be supported on the iPhone. That is, no Software Development Kit (SDK) to create native programs. Among other things, this letdown limited developers' ability to harness the iPhone's coveted multi-touch user interface features.

But that may soon change. Business Week has a hunch that Apple has been waiting for the right moment to throw down with an iPhone SDK, and not for the reasons you might think. Instead of avoiding ticking off their wireless partner, instead of trying to maintain quality control, instead of assuming Dashboard-quality applications would keep iPhone code junkies happy, it seems Apple may've had a different reason altogether for the long wait: Leopard.

If Leopard is the official development platform for the iPhone (and who would expect Apple to release an iPhone development environment for Windows?), then the wait may've been warranted after all. After all, we've not seen any multi-touch technology from Apple except on the iPhone, and one wonders if multi-touch is hanging out in the background of Leopard somewhere, waiting to get called to duty. Meanwhile, Business Week openly speculates that Electronic Arts has already received the SDK, but this hasn't been confirmed. Madden 2009 on the iPhone? Sounds good to us.

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