I've heard lots of different ideas about iPhone being locked to native application development. It may be that limiting development to web-apps will cause a great flowering of cool web-apps for the phone. I don't doubt that.
But, locking your loyal developer community out of doing native Cocoa, OS X applications is a slap in the face and not a good idea for Apple. The developer community is full of little guy Cocoa developers who could write some great little apps for iPhone.
Apple does not have unlimited capacity for development. That's why Leopard got delayed. I think Apple is (1) probably not ready for managing a supporting the developer community who isn't experienced doing mobile applications and (2) they are favoring big guys like Yahoo! and Google and letting them have first dibs.
Apple may just be too darned busy to handle the one more thing of opening up the iPhone at this time. They have to somehow do all these deals and get software that works with the European and Asian carriers in the next little while.
I still think Steve needs to apologize to the developer community for the way he treated them at the developer's conference June 11 and give them more information. Tell them he is committed to eventually opening up the iPhone for developers. At least say he is not ready to give more details but will as soon as possible. Something.
For me, I would prefer native apps. I don't want to wait for Edge or Wi-fi to load something before I can operate. I want to be able to save data to my iPhone and not depend on a connection to a Net application.
In the back of my mind, I am thinking this whole mums-the-word approach that Steve is taking on iPhone development may have to do with Windows development. The iPhone will sell to a lot of Windows users I would guess. If you only develop on Cocoa, you would need a Mac. That may not be inviting to all Windows people. They want to develop on Windows. Does that mean Cocoa for Windows?
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