I am ceaselessly amazed at how Steve Jobs and company can create techno lust in me. This time around it was both AppleTV and the iPhone.
Now that I’ve had 24 hours and a little bit of perspective has set it, its clear that the iPhone is very cool but that are so many unanswered questions.
The biggest question for me is will I be able to install Mac OS X applications onto the iPhone? When I watched the Keynote and I saw Cocoa listed among the OS technologies I thought that the iPhone would be a perfect place for FaceSpan-developed applications to be deployed.
Just like Apple’s DashCode, FaceSpan-built applets would be perfect for this kind of device. Just think of all the stuff you could do with AppleScript on a device with the kind of networking and web capabilities the iPhone possesses! I imagined adding iPhone widgets to the FaceSpan palette and extending the FaceSpan scripting interface with iPhone/synching tools.
The sobering part of this of course is that, while the device may have the full Cocoa toolset, it may not be possible to install anything on the device. I’ll just have to wait and see (And, living in Canada, it will take extra time for the iPhone to be available here).
This still leaves me with the pressing problem that I need to replace my broken iPod now.
Gizmodo reports that Apple is saying the iPhone is a closed system – sigh.
[…] The . message . from . developers . is . clear. We want to develop for it. And in our realm, that is the sincerest form of flattery. […]
I think they’ll eventually open it up. Security for mobile devices is woefully inadequate right now and Apple is taking no chances on a hacking diaster for the iPhone. They’ll get to the point where they are confident the iPhone is largely secure (nothing is perfect) and I predict they’ll start opening it up.