iPhone Apps

I am totally excited about the iPhone Roadmap. The 'enterprise' level features will get the iPhone in more people's hands in more businesses. More halo effect here we come. I could see this even being part of a push to get Mac's into the enterprise as a unix box that 'just works'. Despite the general lameness of the corp environment selling Macs is good for Apple and good for us so I for one am all over the concept of the 'enterprise mac'. I started my professional software life building custom IT software on NeXTStep on the first round of slabs and that was none too shabby of a gig...

On the other hand, enterprise mac thoughts are not the really exciting thing for me. I am really pumped about the SDK and the fact that Core Animation is there. From looking at the iPhone its kind of obvious that CA is a big part of the UI but its great to see that the API is exposed in the SDK. At about 25:30 in the keynote Scott Forestall says 'we built it in may ways for the iPhone' and 'almost every animation you see on the iPhone is built on top of CA'. That is great news! When you learn CA you will be able to transfer that knowledge straight into building iPhone Apps. There is of course a lot of detail (and I can't talk about it cause of the NDA, sigh...)

Apple doing the App Store as a distribution system is going to be a game changer. We no longer have to worry about hosting, payment infrastructure etc etc. The fact that it costs 30% is cheap IMO having had to deal with a sudden uptick in my bandwidth and server requirements. Jens Alfke has an interesting post about doing apps for 99 cents. That is an impulse buy point for sure. I'm not sure that I'd want to build something useful and sell it for 99 cents though. Sure in 2 days you could crank out a simple app that does one thing, but I don't think it could be made to do it well in 2 days. There are all those pesky power and low memory considerations among others that make building for the iPhone different enough from what we are used to... In any event 99 cents or $5.99 the App Store is going to be a whole new world.

I for one can't wait...