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Apple Updates iPhone SDK Amid Complaints

Richard Koman, newsfactor.com Fri Mar 28, 4:36 PM ET

Apple released the second beta version of its software development kit for the iPhone Thursday. The new version contains one significant upgrade: the Interface Builder, a visual editor that lets developers drag and drop icons to easily create the user interface in their applications. ADVERTISEMENT

Some developers had been holding off working on iPhone apps until the interface tool arrived.

While several big-name companies have signed on to develop applications for the iPhone, many independent developers have expressed dismay at the level of access the SDK permits.

Microsoft: iPhone Developer

The latest major company to express interest in iPhone development is Microsoft, which, Fortune reported earlier this week, has been poring over the SDK. "It's really important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone," said Tom Gibbons, vice president of Microsoft's specialized devices and applications group. "To the extent that Mac Office customers have the functionality they need in that environment -- we're actually in the process of trying to understand that now."

Microsoft is one of the largest developers for the Mac outside of Apple and it knows about mobile applications, so it would be well positioned to deliver iPhone apps. "We do have experience with that environment, and that gives us the confidence to be able to do something," Gibbons said. "The key question is, what is the value that we need to bring? We're still getting comfortable with the SDK, right? It's just come out."

Besides Microsoft Office for Mac, Microsoft may well bring its TellMe voice-recognition application -- acquired a year ago -- to the iPhone. If Apple allows applications to do voice recording and location identification, "We're absolutely going to get a version [of TellMe] out there as soon as we can," said Gibbons.

iPhone as IBM PC

But not everyone is thrilled with the SDK. Writing on ZDNet UK, Rupert Goodwins said the SDK is so limited it treats the iPhone as the architectural equivalent of a 1981 IBM PC. "While application designers are free to do almost anything they like, they can't create background tasks: Software either runs on the screen or it doesn't run at all," he wrote.

Goodwins said there are no legitimate reasons for such limitations, since OS X is a modern operating system and the iPhone's processor has up-to-date memory-management hardware. Whatever the real reason for the limitations on third-party developers, "it reflects badly on Apple," Goodwins said. "[Apple is] either not as clever as it makes out, greedier than it likes to admit, more hemmed in by its design decisions than it wishes to make apparent, or just determined to force its vision on the world regardless of what the world wants."

Open Source Developers Push On

Such limitations will not stop the open-source world from developing "real" iPhone applications, or users from "jailbreaking" the phone in order to use those apps, said Jonathan Zdziarski, author of the new book iPhone Open Application Development.

"I am fully confident that the open-source community will continue writing great software using the open-source tool chain, and will offer competition to SDK-developed products that are more restricted in what they can do," he said. "The beta 2 SDK has proven Apple's public developer interfaces are very volatile, while at the same time confirms that the low-level private interfaces they use themselves ... remain stable and more feature-rich than what Apple is offering to developers."

"I sincerely hope Apple embraces open source and opens up their real APIs to others -- without having to jailbreak," he added.