I’m a big Apple fan. There is big Apple news that I feel the need to share! Apple announced at their much publicized event on March 6th that they will be allowing developers to write programs for the iPhone and iTouch devices. The Software Development Kit or SDK is available to download from the Apple site. You will need a MAC running their new Leopard OS to write programs. People, this is really big!!! I was totally blown away watching the event the other evening. Apple invited 5 different companies spanning diverse industries, from games to medical software to present their programs at the event. The developers had 2 weeks to program something new for the event. Some had never written software on the MAC before. The companies themselves were quite surprised to see what they were able to accomplish in such short period of time. I think this move by Apple to invite third-party developers to program using the Apple SDK will propel the IPHONE into new dimensions. This is a huge accomplishment. It is simply a revolutionary device, a hand-held mobile computer that is always connected. In my opinion, Apple is reinventing the personal computer.

Apple will be the gatekeeper for all these programs. The only way you’ll be able to install these programs on your iPhone is through the "App Store" on iTunes which will be accessible using wireless, as well. Developers will name the price for the programs they write. Apple will take 30% off the top and the developer will get 70% of the set price. Apple will be hosting the application, distributing and marketing your application. Developers will need to adhere to Apple’s rules when writing programs. No porn, no malicious software, no illegal or privacy software will be allowed. It has yet to be seen whether Apple will allow applications that might compete with their own applications. If Amazon wants to create an MP3 download service, would Apple allow it to compete with their own WIFI iTunes store application? Or let’s say Sun wants to create a JVM to allow Java programmers to write code; will that be allowed? Lots of questions surface but we’ll have to wait until the end of June to see what happens.

So, being a developer, I absolutely had to download the SDK. I downloaded the "Hello World" sample application and opened up the source code in Xcode ( Apple’s IDE). With a click of a button I had the program running on the IPHONE simulator. I wish I had more time to play with this! As we speak, developers all over the world are writing programs. Bloomberg reported today that the SDK had 100,000 downloads of programs in less than a week. Another interesting point that Adam from the Maccast brought up is, what he calls, the halo effect for developers. He thinks that once developers start creating iPhone programs, they will love the experience and will, thus, want to start developing for MAC products.

Another very cool iPhone feature that is specifically geared to the gaming companies is the accelerometer. The accelerometer detects when the device is turned or moved and the display is viewed differently as directed by the movement. You may view pictures or video in landscape mode or look at a webpage in wide screen. Developers can take advantage and code for how the device is moved in the 3D space. This is particularly applicable to game developers. At the demo, I was blown away by the graphics/accelerometer use in the game called "Spore", developed by EA and a monkey game by Sega. To control the game you move and tilt the iPhone; very cool stuff indeed

I mentioned in a previous post that I am a MAC switcher. We bought a Mac in February of 2006 when Apple made their historic switch to Intel processors. We love our 20 inch IMAC. We are heavy ILIFE applications users and really appreciate the reliability and overall computing experience on the MAC. In this day and age though, it’s hard to get away without one or two Microsoft applications. For me that one program is Microsoft Money. I’ve tried all the other personal financial programs offered on the Mac platform; Quicken for MAC and MoneyDance. The only one I really like is Microsoft Money, which is not available for the Mac. Parallels for MAC allows me to run this Windows program right on my Mac!

There are two approaches to running Microsoft on your MAC. The first is offered by Apple and is called Bootcamp. Bootcamp gives you a program on your Mac that guides you right into running Windows surprisingly quick. You do need a copy of Windows; I used Windows XP. Bootcamp does support Vista now, as well. With bootcamp you decide which OS you want to run at boot-up time. A downside of using Bootcamp is that you can’t run Windows and MAC OS X simultaneously, side by side. Since Bootcamp gives you all the drivers during the install, options such as the right click on the mouse work. iSight video works in Windows. This is a nice option for someone who is a little nervous about making the switch to the MAC .

The other approach is to use Virtual Machine, referred to as “VM”. A VM is software that creates a virtual operating system or an OS and programs to run in. The user interacts with the VM as if it’s a separate OS and the guest OS thinks it’s the only OS using the computer. The benefit to using a VM is that you can run multiple OS’s side by side simultaneously. The VM is essentially running a software virtual OS and needs it’s own RAM to run, therefore, a minimum of 1 gig on your MAC is essential . I have 2 gigs on my MAC and I allocated 512 to the VM which is running XP. I’m currently trying out Parallels for MAC .

Parallels is able to run my bootcamp partition so it was not necessary to reinstall Windows. I’m very happy with parallels. There is a lot you can do, like saving snapshots of your VM. Say you are about to install something on your VM OS online that you’re not sure you want to keep. You can create a point prior to your install on XP and then revert back to the point before the install (it was spyware or something else nefarious you found out) . You can also share files between OS X and the VM (XP in my case). Here is a snapshot of my Parrells screen in which I’m running a few OS X programs and in the VM I’m running XP with IE open to my blog.