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After a few months of no official stance on an iPhone SDK and trying to convince us that web applications were enough of a SDK, Apple has announced that they will release an official SDK for native iPhone/iPod Touch applications by February ‘08.

Here’s the statement from Apple:

Third Party Applications on the iPhone

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch.

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Looks like there is an annoying bug with using Ruby 1.8.3 and Rails 0.13.1. Apparently a method’s parameters were switched around (um, duh?) and this simply breaks Rails… I’ve gone ahead and downgraded to Ruby 1.8.2 until the next version of Rails is released.

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Today at work I was looking into the old annoyance of making tables with scrollbars built in. Normally, since I’m writing in ASP.NET I just have a nice DataGrid and then throw a DIV around it, with a limited height and then assign the overflow-y to something appropriate (scroll or auto).

Now, with this method, you lose your headers when you scroll. It is an obvious side-effect, and if you’ve got a large table with limited scrolling space, it is very annoying to have to go up to the top to see what the columns mean. There is no easy, sure-fire way to fix this across all browsers. FireFox probably behaves the best and lets you scroll on a <tbody> while IE almost requires two tables to make the body scroll how you want it to.

I say IE almost requires the table because just today I ran across this article by a Mr. Geoff Appleby which explains what you need to do to convice IE to play nicely. Essentially, you just make sure IE isn’t rendering in Quirks Mode and then you can use CSS to set position: relative. To implement this in my code, I’ve just got a method that searches through the DataGrid’s controls, looking for the header row (DataGridItem’s ItemType is Header). Then I just set do a quick DataGridItem.Style.Add(”position”, “relative”). Bam! It Just Works^TM. Fortunately I’m working on an IE6-only project, so this is a perfect solution for me :)

I also ran across a more in-depth version, so in-depth that I’m still afraid to view the source.

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PHP v5.0.0 was released last night. This release brings a few important changes and new features to the table.

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It looks like Apple has released the COM API for the Windows version of iTunes. Now we can finally interact with it just like you can in AppleScript.

As I was playing around a bit with this, I whipped up a mIRC script that demonstrates how easy it is now to figure out what is currently playing in iTunes. And here I was going to write my own iTunes Visualizer Plugin to figure out this information… ;)

Oh and for any of you iTunes fans out there, be sure to check out AudioScrobbler. I use it for curiosity’s sake.

And for anybody that missed Apple’s news today, they’re releasing a little gadget they’re calling the Airport Express which can be used to stream music to your stereo (with a new iTunes feature called AirTunes), provide network printing services, or even function as a WiFi bridge. Cool stuff.

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