The iPhone SDK party in Cambridge on Monday was a little disappointing. It was much more networking than substantive content. The iPhone store has a tough layout for large crowds + presenters. Jonathan Zdziarski spoke about the genesis of the open SDK, but I think it’s pretty much dead given Apple’s official SDK release. There were a few demos, but if you’re relatively current on iPhone development, there was no new data.
But hats off to the organizers; there’s always risk in organizing events like this. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.
(But it was good to catch up with folks! I saw: Antonio Rodriguez, Beth Winkowski, Ted Morgan, Ryan Sarver, Daniel Cozza, Dan Slavin, Jeff Glass, Michael Campbell, Dan Allen, Ajay Agarwal, John Keyes, and others.)
I was hoping for a presentation with more technical detail from Jonathan, but aside from that I thought it was a successful event.
The biggest benefit of the Open SDK going forward, I hope, will be that it will provide competitive pressure for Apple to add more capabilities to the (already very impressive for a beta) official SDK.
John: thanks for your note (and good to see you on Monday!)
On the open SDK, I suspect that most of the pushing-the-boundaries energy there will shift to Apple’s SDK / tool chain. In other words, instead of reinventing and maintaining what Apple has already done, folks will start building on and around it.