Fever Builds for iPhone
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Steven P. Jobs has succeeded in building expectations for what some have called âthe God machine.â
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Apple on Wednesday confirmed rumors that it will release a mobile software development kit (SDK) for developers in February so that third parties can create applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch.&quot;We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers&#39; hands in February,&quot; according to a post attributed to Apple CEO Steve Jobs on the company&#39;s Web site.The news should placate irked mobile developers who have already been busy building applications for the iPhone without Apple&#39;s approval. Tech-savvy users have been able to customize their phones with new software, at least until Apple put the kibosh on this activity with an iPhone update in September that erased all unauthorized applications from the device. The company did, however, post a list of approved Web-based applications for the iPhone on its Web site last week to discourage users from hacking into the device to add new applications.It will take Apple until February to come out with an SDK because the company is trying to&#160;create an open platform&#160;so developers can write applications accessing the most advanced iPhone features, as well as a secure environment that isn&#39;t prone to viruses, worms, or other&#160;security threats, Jobs wrote.&quot;This is no easy task,&quot; he wrote. &quot;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.&quot;Jobs noted that other handset providers, such as Nokia, are not allowing applications to be loaded onto some of their new phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced to a legitimate developer.&quot;While this makes such a phone less than &quot;totally open,&quot; we believe it is a step in the right direction,&quot; he wrote.
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Blog: The 8GB iPhone probably cost Apple about $265.83 to build, according to iSuppli, resulting in nice profits at $599 a pop.
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(InfoWorld) - The Java platform may run on 2 billion handheld phones, but not on Apple's trendy new iPhone. Apple's stance was called a mistake by a Sun Microsystems executive Wednesday at the AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara. "I think it's a mistake. I think it would provide a lot more flexibility in applications being developed," for the iPhone, said Bob Brewin, Sun Distingushied Engineer and vice president for software. JavaScript runs on the phone and someone will put Java on the iPhone, Brewin said. But by not having it on there now, iPhone users and Java developers are being shortchanged, according to Brewin. Current Java applications, such as the LimeWire media-sharing application, could be easily ported and developers could choose the Java language for building new programs for the iPhone, he said. There also could be a lot of Java-based games made to work on the device, Brewin said. He attributed Apple's stance to the company wanting developers to develop for only a small set of APIs. "Fundamentally, they don't like open systems," Brewin said. Apple representatives could not be immediately reached for comment Wednesday afternoon, but Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been dismissive of having Java run on the iPhone. Brewin also noted the status of Sun's JavaFX multimedia display technology. JavaFX could give the benefit of rich applications to the iPhone, Brewin said. The JavaFX compiler is available in an early-access release right now. Sun expects to release components of the JavaFX runtime next year, Brewin said. Binaries for the JavaFX Mobile component of the platform will be showcased next year as well. While JavaFX will compete with highly touted technologies such as Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe Systems's Flash and Flex, Brewin believes JavaFX offers advantages. "I think the biggest strength to JavaFX, sort of from a core principal, is because it is built on Java, you know it is ubiquitous," Brewin said. "You're not ... beholden to a proprietary implementation of another vendor," Brewin said. JavaFX also offers a simpler programming model than AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), he added. Also, Brewin said the Java Community Process, a multi-vendor effort on making changes to the Java platform, is going through a transition because of the recent open-sourcing of Java. "When we open-sourced Java, it just changed the dynamic a bit," he said. One example of how it has changed is contributors have to think about whether they want to contribute their intellectual property to what is now an open source platform. But Brewin anticipates the continuance of the JCP. "I think the JCP will thrive," he said. During a morning presentation, Brewin spoke of a "blue shift" and "red shift" phenomenon in computing, comparing IT to the physics concepts of blue and red shifts,Â  in which light turns red as it becomes more distant and blue as it gets closer. The red shift represents applications on the Web, which go out worldwide and scale to millions of persons. The blue shift represents computing in the enterprise, Brewin said. Building red shift applications requires thinking about a different application space, one in which there will not just be 10,000 people using the application behind the firewall but one that could serve 10 million customers, Brewin said.
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It took Apple Inc. more than six months to build the iPhone, but curious gadget fanatics needed only minutes to tear one apart.
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By May Wong Associated Press  SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Get your fingers ready.  Apple Inc.'s iPhone is leading a new wave of gadgets using touch- sensitive screens that react to taps, swishes or flicks of a finger.
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(InfoWorld) - No one ever said Apple marketers weren't clever. So if they wanted to start a firestorm of ISVs developing applications for the iPhone, how better to do that than to make development as simple as possible with the least barriers? Nevertheless, until we hear more details from Apple about the way in which applications are handled on the iPhone, we won't know how clever Apple really is. At WWDC07, Jobs promised that there will be a "new way to create applications for the iPhone" due mainly to the fact that it uses the full Safari browser engine. But a lot of developers are disappointed with what Apple is offering. "Web-based apps are cool for a lot of things. But what people were looking forward to was to to let them develop native applications," said Anthony MeadowÂ , president of Bear River AssociatesÂ , an ISV for mobile applications Without native access to facilities, you don't have storage or sharing of information between applications, or reading and writing from address book and iCal. "There is not any easy way to do that with a Web-based application," said Meadow. Overall, Meadow was not impressed. Although he admitted it is really not very clear what Apple intends. But, he added, "If they don't intend to have access, they should just tell us." Ken Dulaney, the senior mobile analyst with Gartner says Apple's Web 2.0 solution is likely to be similar to what RIM does now. "It avoids having to put code down on the device," Says Dulaney, which in turn protects it from crashing due to outside influences. On RIM devices, the application is rendered on the server side, and the cache in the browser reformats it and pushes it down to the device. "The code is only resident briefly on the device," Dulaney said. Similar technology is also used by device manufacturers using mobile Linux from MontaVista. Now resident on tens of millions of cell phones, the MontaVista design uses a "computing peer" design, Linux on the server and on the phone, giving developers the flexibility of partitioning an application on the client side and server side. An ISV can put a heavy load on the phone or a light one, says Jim Ready, CTO and founder of MontaVista. "Linux on the phone is every bit as capable as Linux on the server," said Ready. Certainly this supports similar statements from Jobs about Safari on the desktop and Safari on the iPhone. However, like Meadow at Bear River, Ready has some reservations about the future capabilities or the richness of applications running on the iPhone. When applications are developed solely using an "abstracted" development environment that doesn't talk to the lower layers of the device, such as the hardware and middleware, there is a dividing line in terms of the capabilities of the application. "Take video frame rates. The reason you back out of an abstracted environment is because you pay for the abstraction in performance. It is a tradeoff," said Ready. And not only for performance -- developers also need to write native applications that get down closer to access the hardware and the middleware for size and control reasons, as well, although Meadow doesn't see access to hardware as a major problem. "There is a handful of people that care about writing to the chips. It is possibly useful for really high performance graphic drivers and low level networking code," he says. So where does that leave gamers and business users whose need for rich network applications might be problematic on the iPhone? Unfortunately, until the full story is known, it is hard to tell what the software limitations of the iPhone will be. Certainly, if Apple wants the device to be a great mobile gaming system for use by millions of road warriors during those long waits at the airport, it will have to address the issue of how to get developers to write applications native to both the hardware and middleware. In business as well, cell phones are currently being used with customized software, such as bar code and RFID readers. "You can't do that with a browser interface," says Jerry Panagrossi, vice present of U.S. Operations for Symbian. "You need something more in-depth that can talk to IBM or Oracle middleware using native APIs for a richer experience." Jim Ready at MontaVista sums it up when he says keeping the development environment as simple as possible will facilitate the largest amount of applications. As far as the capabilities of those applications Ready says, "There are limits, but sometimes it's okay that there are limits."
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The buzz over Apple Computer&#39;s next iPod music player has reached a fevered pitch after one web site posted details and a mock up drawing of the new device, which stores
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Third-party software developers can create Web 2.0 applications to run on Apple's forthcoming iPhone.
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That rumbling sound you hear is from third-party developers, who are revving up their engines following Wednesday's announcement that Apple will release a Software Development Kit (SDK) for the iPhone.
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As the wait for Apple Inc.'s iPhone reaches a fevered pitch, here are five trends in gadgets that may be even more important, and a few highly touted ideas that may not make it.
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Looks like the time has come when mobile users would have to seriously consider getting some protection for their devices. Mobile viruses are coming out pretty regularly now and trend seems to be pointing towards a frantic future.
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The open-source Firefox browser is headed to a mobile device near you. New mockups released by Mozilla show that mobile Firefox, due later this year, is being designed with the latest touch screen handhelds -- possibly including the iPhone -- in mind.
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By Joe Hutsko  Apple's hotly anticipated iPhone, which ships June 29, garners oohs and ahhs for a number of reasons, a big one being the way the device's Safari Web browser displays pages just like the desktop version.
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A beta version of Apple's Web browser is now available for Windows, and budding iPhone developers can use it to create applications.
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Enough already! Comments It's been a particularly iPhone-strewn week, now that the Yanks have got their hands on the precious device, and the lovers and haters have come right out of the woodwork.â¦
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There's more to gain than lose from the upcoming iPhone.