iPhone SDK early Beta: A Tale of Disappointment
March 15th, 2008“The SDK is free!”
Mostly. If you want to be able to distribute your apps to anyone else, you’ll need to fork over $99 to Apple. Oh and remember, you have to have OSX 10.5 to even run the version of XCode you need. So be ready for fork over another $130 if you’re a Mac developer, or even another $500 or so to get a Mac Mini if you’re a PC developer who wants in the iPhone developer game.
“Test in the emulator or an iPhone!”
Yes and not quite yet. The emulator is very good, but you can’t test any app which reads data from the accelerometer. No problem, just plug in your iPhone, right? Oops, that’ll wipe out your phone data, which you’ll have to restore later. Oh and you can’t really unless Apple have sent you an iPhone with the 2.0 software on it. Till then, it’ll be emulator only for most of us.
The SDK is fine to start playing with native apps, and I’m really happy Apple put it out. The instant gratification of “download this, code up something cool, and put it on your iPhone” just isn’t there yet. Alas.