At some point last night, Apple’s development servers fell over and died. These servers can hold 40 000+ concurrent download streams but there were so many people downloading the new iPhone SDK that the whole server became unresponsive. After several hours of trying, I finally got a connection at 11 pm and left the SDK and iTunes videos to download overnight, which they did. At the same time, I watched the video of the introduction of the SDK and demos from AOL, Saleforce and EA. As it drew to a close, so did my eyes.
- This morning I installed the SDK and started to read what teh internets was saying about the day before. There are guys from Apple on Twitter providing links and snippets of info to help people get started. And of course, teh internets have spoken.
Jason at 37signals sounds off on his vision for the iPhone.
“What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile.”
Steve Job’s Fortune interview (which I covered here yesterday) talks about how bad it feels to not be able to capture market share even though you might have a much better product. The iPod shows that it’s possible to capture a market by crafting a good product. Apple’s history has been full of examples of how to lose a market in the past so it’s nice to see them taking the lead for once.
- TUAW reports that iPlayer is actually working for the iPhone. Content is limited but I’d encourage everyone with an iPhone to give it a go.
“A limited selection of shows from the iPlayer have been made available to UK residents on their iPhones. … At the moment only the BBC-produced ‘Whistleblower’ documentary seems to be working from the iPlayer website, with content being streamed-only via the iPhone’s built-in QuickTime player “
- Apple has posted the video of the SDK Roadmap here so if you have a spare hour or so, give it a go.
- From the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines
Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits.
This is a serious consideration when you’re managing things like editing documents or wanting to save progress in a game. There has to be some continuation – do you ‘journal’ progress? Are there spare cycles in the CPU to do a quick save every second?
- We had a bit of an emergency meeting in the wee small hours this morning over IM regarding the futures of our software development efforts and we’re going to publish that news in a few days.