iPhone SDK: It's called Safari - (37signals)

37signals.com

12 points·brett··9 comments

Jesus... these guys (37 signals) are so pumped up on the fact that web apps (their area of expertise) is the only thing this phone will be able to do...

Safari? SDK? Wooo... If I want to roll out my own address book version for an iPhone, how the hell will I do that with Safari? Or at least some address book integration? Or how about making/receiving calls programmatically? How about using any of iPhone hardware to do anything?

For 37signals, and companies like them, the ones who build ta-da lists and write books on how to build ta-da lists, that is a very welcome announcement.

But for software engineers/entrepreneurs this is pretty sad news...

According to Jobs' keynote, there will be hooks for the iPhone hardware, you will be able to make calls and all that. Exactly how extensive it is remains to be seen, but there will be something.

You can already create links in web pages that will dial a phone number when activated with mobile phone browsers. Similarly, I assume that the email integration is going to be basically "mailto:" links. Maybe they will have support for HTML 5 features like like INPUT TYPE="email" as well.

a href="wtai://wp/mc;16504808000" a href="tel:+358-555-1234567"

The real questions, that don't seem to have answers yet, are:

- What sort of access do you get to the phone?

- What possibilities do you have to store applications on the phone and use them when you aren't connected?

I called this, btw: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546

So devs will have to use JavaScript? Yuck. I'd rather they used Objective-C or Python or Ruby or something else.

Javascript is one of the best programming languages available. It's about 90% Lisp.

Why did you guys down voted this guy?

I think I came off as condescending. Sorry about that.

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