iPhone SDK

Despite the lack of a formal SDK, I think there are some amazing opportunities for pushing data to the iPhone from the desktop. One thing that pops to mind immediately would be a PDF workflow which allows me to “print” any document to my iPhone and take it with me — great for maps, tourist websites (e.g., “where is the Stedelijk Museum?”). If not PDFs, then perhaps Safari web archives?

I wonder if this will be possible. To be honest I think I’d rather mount the iPhone as a filesystem and have really good tools for “publishing” data to it, and viewing data on it, than deal with the potential complexity of third-party software installs.

Remember this is a device which demands 99.9% reliability. What third-party (or even first-party) applications on Mac OS X have that today? There are some, but reaching that goal is tremendously difficult.

The last thought I had was about the lack of Flash on the handset. I’ve done a lot of work with Flash on the desktop lately on Windows and I have to say that despite Adobe’s efforts to modernize their infrastructure, Flash is still a very primitive technology with strong roots in education CD-ROMs on Mac OS 9 — they’ve made tremendous strides in terms of rapid application development and deployment, but I don’t think performance or reliability has ever really been on Adobe’s radar with this product.

Some of the problems I’ve encountered include random crashes on shutdown, enormous memory leaks in the runtime (a leak in something that draws at 24fps is a huge issue!) — not to mention Flash’s notoriously awful performance. On the application side, many Flash applications (no naming names) written to run in Flash in a browser just don’t care about performance or resource utilization because most web applications have a process lifetime of a page view, or about 10 seconds. Finally, in a mobile context, consider the effect that Flash’s inefficient programming model will have on battery life. The last thing to remember is that the Flash runtime’s performance is about 4-20x worse on Mac OS X than it is on Windows — I bet Apple evaluated its options and decided it didn’t want to have its browser experience marred by Adobe’s lack of focus. You can also bet that with all the crazy user-space scaling tricks that iPhoneSafari does, Flash wouldn’t work.

This isn’t to say that Flash on the handset wouldn’t be useful, but if you consider the use cases it’s really not as big a deal as you might think. Flash games? Okay, that’s a pretty exclusive one. If Apple hooks up whatever non-FLV (finally!) based media source they’ve got with YouTube to the handset, then you don’t need Flash for that. Widgets on MySpace? Cute, but since every page has 18 of them I’m willing to bet it won’t work well on iPhoneSafari.app anyway. When I think about what I’ll be using the iPhone browser for — maps, banking, maybe a little light news — I don’t see a place where I want Adobe Flash.

I totally want NewsFire for iPhone though. Damn, that’d be nice.

[UPDATE: Oh yeah, Leopard. Safari “web clip”. Clip this web page and put it on my iPhone. Nice.]