Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Steve Talks About SDK, Flash On The iPhone


At an annual shareholder’s meeting 3/4/2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made two noteworthy comments regarding the iPhone. To be succinct:

Jobs said “You’ll see a lot of apps out there this summer,” referring to native applications born out of the iPhone software developers’ kit (SDK) due to be discussed at a special event this Thursday. We don’t know if these means Jobs thinks it will take a few months for developers to start cranking out applications with an SDK that’s released soon, or if it indicates that the SDK won’t be in developers’ hands until Summer. We’ll have to wait until Thursday to find out.
Adobe Flash won’t be coming to the iPhone anytime soon. Jobs said the full-blown version of Flash would perform poorly on the iPhone, and Flash Lite isn’t the spirit of the iPhone’s full internet experience. In mid-February we noted: flash performance and usage is abysmal on current mobile devices that support playback. With regard to performance, mobile device processors — including the iPhone’s — simply aren’t fast enough to handle most Flash-laden sites. Flash Lite, the scaled down standard designed specifically for mobile devices, is even too much for most devices, and isn’t widely used.

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