Mark Scrimshire's Blog

I was tapped in to the live blogging of the iPhone SDK on March 6th, and I came away with a negative and a positive thought. First the negative. The iPhone 2.0 firmware is going to add a lot of great features that makes the iPhone a great fit with the Enterprise but there is Still No Cut and Paste!

On the positive side I think the most significant aspect of this event was not even articulated. I am convinced that Apple has gone and created another halo effect. Think about it. If you want to develop for iPhone you need to do it on a Mac. Not only do you need to do it on a Mac but you need to use our Xcode development environment.

The environment that Apple has created for iPhone development is very neat. There's an iPhone software emulator, a remote debugger and instrumentation to provide run-time profiling of applications. This is all well and good but the most significant aspect of this is that this is the same environment used to create Mac OS X applications. 

Yes, the most significant, but under-rated aspect of this announcement is that Apple may well have just created a whole new army of Mac developers. After all, if the iPhone is built on the core of Mac OS X and the development environment supports both iPhone and Mac OS Xdesktop applications how long will it be before we see a proliferation in Mac OS X applications? This has the potential to be a far bigger halo effect for Apple than the iPod. 

How long will it be before we see applications appearing on the iPhone, then on Mac OS X and finally being ported to Windows? It is already happening on the web where I am already seeing Web 2.0 developers build for Firefox and Safari first because they are both considered cross-platform browsers, unlike Internet Explorer.