The prevailing sentiment seems to be that the presence of the word enterprise in the iPhone SDK unveiling meeting Thursday March 6th means that Apple is taking a RIMshot. While that may be true, I think it at least equally likely that, since we are talking about an SDK, and the details haven't leaked, it could mean that development for the SDK is coming to Windows and Visual Studio. I know, sounds crazy, why wouldn't Apple use the iPhone SDK as leverage to guarantee new Xcode and Mac OS X developers? A developer halo? They may, but they may also be thinking that they sacrifice exclusive development on Mac OS X to accelerate and increase iPhone OS X adoption by making the SDK available on Windows. They ported Safari to Windows for iPhone Web app testing, so there is some precedent. Could Xcode be coming to Windows? Seems like if that's the case, Cocoa is only a stones through from being fully ported and supported on Windows as a development runtime. This of course may all be entirely wrong, and enterprise only means integration with Notes and Exchange, but Apple likes to surprise, and it's fun to speculate. If this is even half right, I will look like a genius ;-), and I have absolutely no insider information.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
iPhone SDK: Enterprise Development Coming?
The prevailing sentiment seems to be that the presence of the word enterprise in the iPhone SDK unveiling meeting Thursday March 6th means that Apple is taking a RIMshot. While that may be true, I think it at least equally likely that, since we are talking about an SDK, and the details haven't leaked, it could mean that development for the SDK is coming to Windows and Visual Studio. I know, sounds crazy, why wouldn't Apple use the iPhone SDK as leverage to guarantee new Xcode and Mac OS X developers? A developer halo? They may, but they may also be thinking that they sacrifice exclusive development on Mac OS X to accelerate and increase iPhone OS X adoption by making the SDK available on Windows. They ported Safari to Windows for iPhone Web app testing, so there is some precedent. Could Xcode be coming to Windows? Seems like if that's the case, Cocoa is only a stones through from being fully ported and supported on Windows as a development runtime. This of course may all be entirely wrong, and enterprise only means integration with Notes and Exchange, but Apple likes to surprise, and it's fun to speculate. If this is even half right, I will look like a genius ;-), and I have absolutely no insider information.