World Wide Developers Conference 2008
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All Apple fans and most computer gurus know about the World Wide Developers Conference. It's where thousands of Mac gurus and media reporters gather to talk mainly about programming and applications on OS X. Join us as we take a close look at what happened at the conference this year.
This is a big event, but most of the news that makes it to the blogs is the day one stuff; the rest of the conference goes under the radar as it's not much more than a bunch of lectures on various parts of OS X and programming.
Steve Jobs loves to kick off the WWDC with some exciting new stuff coming from Apple and its partners. In past years we typically saw all kinds of new products from various Apple divisions. Typically we see news about Macs, iPods, and OS X.
This year was a little different. It was all about iPhones. Sadly there wasn't much news outside of iPhone evolution; WWDC could have been renamed iPhone Fest 2008. We saw implementation of iPhone's SDK, and an introduction of a new iPhone.
iPhone SDK 2.0
The biggest lack for the first generation iPhone was software, and the iPhone SDK was born to solve this problem. In the 95 days leading up to the WWDC, Apple was beta testing the SDK to a select few. It was downloaded 250,000 times in 95 days.
The biggest development was the support for Microsoft's Exchange server. This feature is a must for business people. Thirty-five percent of the Fortune 500 companies participated in this beta; many of them were the top companies in their respective categories. Apple finally realized that if you want business users, you need security. As great as the ability to create your own applications may be, the ability to connect to WPA and VPNs is just as important.
Apple invited a few of the developers that have been developing applications for the iPhone. My favorite has to be Sega, with their Super Monkey Balls. I love that game, and the iPhone version looks great. There are over 120 levels and all the main characters found in console games. The game uses the iPhone's accelerometer for movement, bringing a new type of gaming to mobile devices -- a little Wii-like, if you ask me.
There were a few other developers, such as eBay, and even a single developer that built his program in his spare time. The graphics were up there with the Nintendo DS and none of the games hinted at any lag issues with hardware either. Company after company raved about how easy it was to program for the iPhones with the new SDK. One company even had multiple applications available a week after the SDK launch.
Next: SDK continued >>
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