Rick's World

Link: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/

This is the best news about the iPhone that I've read in months!

The iPhone is a great device to develop for. The problem is, it can be a very difficult device to program for, especially if you are not an expert at Objective-C and Mac programming in general. I am one of those people who is not an expert at this stuff. As such, I am often looking for help as to how to fix certain programming problems I encounter while programming. So what would I normally do in this case? Google! The problem is, the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) that all iPhone developers sign (including myself) forbids anyone from talking about how to program the iPhone. This means you are essentially on your own. If you can't find it in the Apple documentation, you are out of luck. You have to figure it out on your own. This is despite the fact that there are thousands of other iPhone developers out there, one of which is sure to have encountered the same problem and knows how to fix it.

This forced silence placed on all developers had hurt the iPhone development market in huge ways. There is a huge amount of knowledge out there but noone can access it. By now, there should be hundreds, if not thousands of articles out there on the Internet as to how to program various parts of the iPhone. There are finished books on how to program the iPhone that can't be published because of the NDA. There are no doubt many open source programs, modules etc. for the iPhone that can't be published for the iPhone.

Today all that changed. Apple finally relented and dropped the NDA. From the announcement, it is also very clear that Apple is doing this begrudgingly. The announcement is very politely worded, but if you 'read between the lines' of the announcement, it's clear that they are doing this because they received a flood of complaints and bad press for keeping it up.

The floodgates have finally been opened. We'll very rapidly start to see books being published, articles being published, open source code being made available, and discussion groups being opened. (One already has been). I hope that now that this information is available, we'll start to see a great increase in the quality of published iPhone apps in the future. Due to the lack of information previously we've been stuck with a lot of frankly, low-quality software. That will now change. I can't wait to see what happens. Suddenly I'm enthusiastic about iPhone development again.