Wow! This is the news all us iPhone owners have been waiting for. The iPhone now becomes truly competitive with Palm and Windows Mobile phones. E-book programs, plural, will surely be on the way.
[Moderator’s note: Mike Cane correctly notes: "Of course, Apple’s own program will be the one to beat. But as long as people can put on ported version of MobiPocket (wake up, Amazon!), FBReader, etc, people should be very, very happy! – DR]
See round-ups from Google and Techmeme as well as the Apple news release below.
"Third Party Applications on the iPhone
Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.
It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.
Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.
We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.
Steve
P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]"
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It occurred to me that some of our readers might not know what is meant by the term "SDK". SDK is an abbreviation for Software Developer’s Kit. This is a set of instructions, and sometimes some code, that is given to the software developers so that they know how to interact with the iPhone. For example, it will tell the software developer what code he needs for his application to recognize a finger sliding over the screen, or how to address the pixels on the screen so he knows how to draw a picture on it. Without an SDK a software developer has to figure this stuff all out himself. This is very hard to do because it is very low level programming that sits behind the actual application and allows the application to communicate with the screen, touch screen, speaker, buttons, etc. By releasing the SDK Apple will make it easy for developers to make their own programs without doing a lot of trial and effort to figure out how the iPhone actually works.
This means that now there is the potential for a real ebook reader to be developed or even that an existing one, such as eReader, FBReader, or Mobipocket, could be ported over to the iPhone.
Thanks, Paul!
This is great news for e-book apps. People have been BEGGING for this–see examples here, here and here from Mike Cane.
David
And begging for ebooks on the iPhone too!
See here and links under Previously therein.
Great news indeed. The creator of Books.app already said on Teleread that he’s working on epub support and I hope we’ll see a port of FBReader too (I can’t live without hyphenation support, it’s one of the killer features on FBReader).
Hadrien: just an education question – why is hyphenation support important to you?
With proper typesetting rules it’s much easier to read a book. For example, if the text lacks proper justification it won’t be as easy on the eyes. If there’s too much blank space between two words, it’s harder for our brain to process the information.
Many studies proved that proper typesetting can change how easily we understand a book. Some publishers hate XML-based format for this reason: they expect much better layout and typesetting from a book.
When I read on my Sony Reader, I’m looking for an experience much closer to the experience of reading a book than reading something on a screen.
There is one already. It’s called Safari.
There is one already. It’s gorgeous http://reader.dbelement.com