Last night marked a unique event in history. The Apple Store in Cambridge MA allowed me to come in through the front door and deliver a keynote to some 200+ people as they hosted the Mobile Monday Boston conference. In spite of the sheer chaos of fitting so many people into such a small store, and the generally poor acoustics of a mall, what the conference lacked in elegance was quickly made up for in quality of content. <\/p>\n
I was invited to speak at the SDK party about the long hacking history of the iPhone, and made no bones about putting a stake in the ground as the open source community’s claim to third-party application development as being the first on the scene, since August 2007. In addition to that, I praised Apple for such a remarkable device – the first mobile device that, rather than being some chopped up version of a desktop OS, was a full blown Leopard OS that had been augmented with additional frameworks and tools for interfacing with the iPhone’s proprietary form factor. I spent a little time highlighting the big differences between Apple’s SDK and the tride-and-true Open Source SDK, which uses the authentic low-level APIs that Apple’s applications have shown to use. It’s amazing to think that the open source community has now estimated approximately two million iPhones to be running third-party jailbreak software and the community Installer – that’s 40% of the total iPhone market! Apple can only hope for this same level of penetration into the market, and in fact likely won’t get it unless they also cater to the 1\/3rd of the market running unlocked iPhones on other networks (something the Installer does interoperate with). As I said last night, the open source community is dominating, but we welcome our new enterprise friends into iPhone development. It’s about time you got here – it’s been a lonely eight months without you!<\/p>\n
Last night marked a unique event in history. The Apple Store in Cambridge MA allowed me to come in through the front door and deliver a keynote to some 200+ people as they hosted the Mobile Monday Boston conference. In spite of the sheer chaos of fitting so many people into such a small store, and the generally poor acoustics of a mall, what the conference lacked in elegance was quickly made up for in quality of content. <\/p>\n