Scattered

Looks like Apple is indeed planning an open SDK for release in February.

The company just announced on its Hot News feed (and we’d say this certainly qualifies as such), that it is currently at work on an SDK for the iPhone, the apps from which will naturally work on the iPod touch. Apparently it’s going to take ‘em until February to do it up right — you know, secure and stable and all that nonsense — but this is certainly a beautiful breath of fresh air.

 

Apple has seen a lot of criticism for not allowing 3rd party apps on to iPhone, well before it’s launch, now it seems the whiners are getting what they wanted and knew they weren’t getting at the time of purchase.

Less excitingly, Apple claims that it agrees with Nokia’s approach of “digital signatures” for applications, meaning that Apple gets to say who qualifies for entrance onto its hallowed devices as was rumored last week; though who’s to say what exactly that will look like just yet. But even with that caveat, we suppose we should take what we get from this sometimes benevolent, but never aesthetically challenged, dictator of ours and eat it like we’re told.

 

It looks like the iPhone wont be completely “open”, since there applications would need to be “approved” and this process could be extremely limiting to developers (e.g. Sidekick) on what they can and can’t do or just a submission process for the app to be cataloged.

Either way I’d love to see some kind of quality control. Both Treo and Blackberry have applications that are written poorly and subsequently crash the phone.

The next question would be, “what is the delivery system”. If iTunes, would it be through the iTunes store and will developers be allowed to sell their applications.

The apps I want to see (some already available through installer.app):

• Terminal
• gTalk or Chat with multi-protocol support
• Podcast OTA downloader
• Games and NES emulater
• eBook Reader

After listing these apps, only the first two are really needed and the second is the only necessary one for me. Maybe I can wait till February for an SDK after all. Especially since I see a chat client coming out before then.