"The last time I was this excited about a new SDK was probably when .NET 2.0 came out"

OK, that's the funniest thing I think I've ever read in one of these articles. I didn't realize how completely sarcastic it was, but then I imagined Lewis Black reading it out loud and it finally made sense. This whole article is supposed to be a joke. If that's the case, I guess I'll play along:

"Needless to say, my hopes and dreams came crumbling down when I realized that this new fangled iPhone device contained an operating system, and if that isn't bad enough, one that was based on some kinda open source garbage - not even windows CE (the nerve!). So I threw the thing out, and promptly started working on SharePoint Unleashed 2nd ed. where at least nobody has the gaul to use an undocumented API. Why are these people doing that? Huh? Why did they have to go and do that? I mean, wait for the shared source license to come out for Pete's sake."

Having bought and read the pre-release version of the book discussed here ("Rough-Cuts" edition, available on O'Reilly's site for $20), I tend to disagree with Kevin's opinion and lean more towards the book's author's view that the "unofficial" SDK, or the at least the API represented in it, are likely to more-or-less remain equivalent to the ones that would be exposed by the official Apple iPhone SDK. The iPhone platform implements a subset of the Mac OS X API which the book describes quite nicely. Why on earth would Apple want to re-invent a new API just for the iPhone SDK, after it's worked so hard to perfect its API over a decade? For spite, just to break the existing applications and necessitate a rewrite? Not a strong argument here.

Seriously, get the rough-cuts edition now and read it. Consider it a preview for the official SDK. Most of the material it discusses is likely to remain outside the sandbox, and therefore will probably get included within the iPhone SDK.

The only thing I can see which the book doesn't cover and Apple will likely want to address in their SDK is exposition of some of data in the phone via official APIs; things like calendar entries, phone records, contacts, mail messages, and the like. The reason for this is that if you want to get this data today you'll do that by accessing these application data files directly, which breaks the sandbox model.

If you build your GUI with the unofficial SDK, it would most likely be very easy to port it over to the official SDK once it's out in the wild. I can see no reason to wait and not get started doing so now.

I think this blog entry is stupid.

If you're correct, and the book is about jailbroken iPhones, I think it is really cool of O'Reilly to flip the finger at Apple's idiotic attitude.

"Confusing the developers" - are you insane or something? Do you believe that you are the only "developer" with more than about 6 brain cells? A "developer" that starts coding on an iPhone without realizing what he's really up against must be fully brain damaged.

No, no one will be confuzed. Seriously.

ColdFusion Developer's Journal - wow..

Hello? There are a million hacked iPhones out there. Hacking the iPhone is the only reason to buy it.

Surely they can cater for the reality of iPhone usage in the market ? Hacking the phone and breaking the software license agreement isn't necessarily bad or illegal.. depends who you talk to... There are laws that support the consumer's rights to reverse-engineer their device, or to make changes to allow moving to a different carrier (eg the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Just because it conflicts with the user's agreement with Apple doesn't make it a 'bad thing', it just means they might have to deal with some contractual consequences, or not...

"How many potential developers might stumble upon the information on O'Reilly's site, follow the instructions to start coding, only to eventually realize that customers with unhacked phones can't run their apps??"

I think that a person that starts writing code without even notice that it will work only with jailbreaked phones don't have any idea about iphone development and doesn't even deserve the "developer" title.

So is O'Reilly actually condoning the hacking of the phones? O'Reilly has had a long and prestigious history as being the ultimate source for *nix manuals, including many books that became so dogeared I actually bought multiple copies, including dozens of 'in a nutshell' books.