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Daniel Jalkut On Wil Shipley On iPhone’s “SDK”

Wil Shipley made the point about the iPhone SDK as only he can, and Daniel Jalkut summarises Wil in a way that sums it up for me:

Wil Shipley On iPhone’s “SDK”: “

If I wanted to program in a crappy language just so I could get more customers, I’d switch to Windows, not stinking JavaScript.

Pretty much sums it up for me, too. Wil makes this point and about a million other cutting and accurate remarks about Apple’s sloppy presentation of web development as an ‘SDK’ for the iPhone. It’s a common theme among developers that we feel burned not by the lack of an SDK, but by the fact that Apple expects us to believe that this is one.

(Via Red Sweater Blog.)

There is an element of dog-whistling here, though. No developer, except perhaps certain utopian hipsters with a Rails fetish, really believes that this is the end of the story for iPhone development. I don’t know if the expression on Scott Forstall’s face is under the WWDC NDA, but the way he can configure his eyebrows tells a story.

The real story, the one I’d put the $40US currently in my wallet on, goes like this:

“We busted our collective ass getting the iPhone out the door on time, and there’s no way in hell we can have a clean and properly documented real SDK for developers out the door at the same time. Especially considering that the iPhone is running an iPhone-optimized version of Leopard - an OS we haven’t finished yet - on hardware that isn’t PPC or Intel. But… web apps will work, and here’s a set of standards for those to tide you over until then.”

We all know that. We’re smart, we can read between the lines.

But somehow something got fubared, Steve got the wrong message in his head, and it came out as, “Hey! Web apps are the SDK! Enjoy!”

Stupid, stupid Apple.

That people like Wil Shipley are still wasting effort and words on this amazes me. Then again, every dev worth his salt has a case of priapism at the very thought of getting in on the ground floor and writing cool iPhone apps RIGHT NOW. So I can understand a bit of the outrage.

Still, perhaps Wil should just put on one of his stylish shirts, get in his pimp ride, and drive around the block with the top down a few times. The weather here in Seattle is ideal for it right now.

(The phrase “certain utopian hipsters with a Rails fetish” wins best snark of the week, by the way.)

I think it was clear as soon as we knew the (smallish) number of “TBA” sessions on the WWDC schedule that there was no way they were introducing a whole new development API at that event.

I agree 100% with your analysis, and don’t begrudge Apple the time it takes to make the iPhone SDK solid. As Daniel said, the spin hurts more than the rejection