[Geowanking] the iPhone discussion

[Andrew Turner]

On 1/11/07, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
>
> Anselm Hook <anselm at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> gee i wouldn't mind being able to write native apps...  video-game like
> interfaces and the like... things where the interface performance is
> important...
>
> The other thing I forgot to mention (curse my goldfish-like attention span)
> is Widgets. It's not yet clear whether "you can't install your own native
> apps" extends to Widgets. It may not.
>

Right - widgets can either be entirely JS - or have a core application
sitting behind it (therefore using Cocoa and Obj-C) to do unique
things. Since the iPhone will support widgets - seems that it will
support your own applications. Of course, does that mean the full
Cocoa API and access to all HW?

> Last year Apple released (inadvertently) an IDE for Widgets, called Dashcode
> (http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/dashboard.html). Why
> go to the trouble of putting together a whole IDE for a fairly marginal
> feature of OS X? Maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with the
> iPhone...
>

Dashcode is going to be bundled w/ the next OS - and also is now
available to developers. Dashboard Widgets have been pushed by Apple
as a "big thing" with the release of Tiger (10.4), so it wasn't
indicative of "bigger things to come" in the iPhone.

However, it *is* a really great way for them to bring out this feature
to where it's really useful, as ambient information display on small
screens. They always pushed - keep it small and simple.

So if you can hook in to the full Cocoa API you can have your spinny
globe/tilt controls to do application displays.