Apple's Intel Mac iPhone SDK

One of the clever things that Apple did when they made the iPhone SDK was tailor it to XCode and the Intel-Macs -- you won't be able to use an old PowerPC Mac to develop for the iPhone, and the XCode IDE is included with every Mac, making it pretty easy to get started on. In making this Intel-Mac only, one can definitely sense the shift that is about to occur in Cupertino, with the next MacOS likely to follow the same trend away from PowerPC.

Every mobile phone developer wants to make a program for the iPhone, or at least port over an existing app to the iPhone, and that means they're getting a new Intel-Mac (if they don't already have one); the long term effect of this of course, is that things will slowly shift from PC workstations to Mac environments for developing on the iPhone. I find that the Mac actually satisfies my needs for an development operating system pretty well -- it functions as a Mac, a Unix box, and a Windows box if I so choose.

The uncompressed SDK runs about 5GB in total, but the installer includes gcc, which no doubt accounts for a large chunk of the SDK. Some of the installed apps in the SDK are pretty buggy; in trying to run the Instruments.app, I ran into an infinite loop when it came to trying to quit without saving, and was forced to Force-Quit the app.

This SDK was likely rushed out the door, but it should suffice for the time being, allowing developers to get started on their projects to port (or to create) programs for the iPhone in time for the June launch of iPhone 2.0

I'm really looking forward to seeing some of the programs that are released for the iPhone, though I must admit, the addition of AIM is what I look forward to the most.