Steve Jobs, you big beautiful bastard, pucker up and grab the Purell, because I’m about to kiss you full on the mouth.
For those of you who felt the earth shudder this morning, that was the sound of 10 million simultaneous nerdgasms as Big Fruit introduced the iPhone SDK.
Twitter immediateIy collapsed. I realize Twitter is just below Britney Spears on the list of things we expect to see go down, but to be fair, it managed to survive the Superbowl.
Clearly, the iPhone SDK is bigger than the Superbowl. Hell, it might even be bigger than the iPhone, if Apple’s own site is any indication. Want to test your servers against a massive DDoS attack? Announce an SDK for the iPhone.
As far as the specifics of the announcement itself, I am completely pleased. All the API I was afraid might not be there are there. Integration with Xcode, Interface Builder, and Instruments is more than I could have hoped for.
I suspect the two areas of whinery will be Apple’s 30% cut — to say nothing of control — via the iTunes Application Store, and the $99 publishing fee. Neither one of these things bother me one bit.
I’ve been wanting an iTunes Application Store since the day Steve announced the iTunes Music Store. It would be a great distribution model, and it would free people like me from having to dick around with eCommerce.
I admit 30% seems a little steep, but it’s not unreasonable. I look at Apple’s proposition and I think it’s worth it. Do I wish it were 10%? Of course, but I’m willing to take 30% and be happy about it. Hell, I’d happily make the same deal for distributing desktop applications.
The $99 set-up fee is more clear cut. A friend of mine called it the “Are you serious?” fee. Apple has to have some minor barrier to entry to keep any yahoo off the street from wasting their time. They could have made ADC seed-level membership a requirement and didn’t, so bully for Apple.
The only problem I have is that United Lemur’s charity licensor is obviously not going to work. I will file a bug against iTunes, but I don’t expect anything to come of it. I’ll just have to come up with a generic funds-matching program instead, but that’s OK. If things work out as I hope, much, much more of United Lemur’s revenue will be going to charity than to me.
Everyone at United Lemur I’ve spoken to is extremely excited by this announcement. Expect production on our first commercial software product to ramp up starting today. Here’s a teaser — it’s a game for the iPhone, and it’s going to be amazing.
Expect production on our first commercial software product to ramp up starting today. Here’s a teaser — it’s a game for the iPhone, and it’s going to be amazing.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
History (beta)
