SaveNetRadio.org: “Thousands of U.S. webcasters plan to turn off the music and go silent this Tuesday, June 26, to draw attention to an impending royalty rate increase that, if implemented, would lead to the virtual shutdown of this country’s Internet radio industry.”

Interestingly, TechCrunch reports that Last.fm, recently acquired by CBS, will not be participating.

Steve Jobs: “And you can’t do that stuff in a browser.”

Quentin’s note from yesterday has been linked quite a bit, with plenty of discussion in the comments. I’d like to follow up on a few things.

First off, I want to correct the idea that we believe web applications are somehow trivial compared to desktop applications. This is not the case at all, and if any comments implied this I apologize. There’s a place for both types of applications right now, and we use both web and desktop apps daily.

What we’re talking about here is the difference between web apps - applications that run on a remote web server and require an internet connection, and desktop apps - applications that run locally, with access to the local disk and hardware.

Apple is attempting to say (to a room filled largely with Cocoa developers) “Hey, you’ve got all you need to get on the iPhone. Just make a web app!”. If this is a perfect solution, there’d be no reason to have custom-built apps on the iPhone at all. For that matter, no one would need to care about Leopard or any new OS, as we could just build everything for Safari, and we’d be on the Mac, Windows, and iPhone. But in reality, desktop apps aren’t going anywhere any time soon.

Creating web apps to run on the iPhone will be a great solution for many tasks, but it is not a new solution, nor Apple hasn’t done anything new for developers. This is what we had from the get-go, when Apple announced there’d be a full-fledged browser on the phone. Web apps on the iPhone will also be stuck with something of a second-class status compared to local apps, as they can’t be accessed from the main menu, they can’t be used offline, they can’t access the local disk, and more.

Is there anything we can’t do with web apps? As our own Mike Ash pointed out in discussing this, all computer systems are Turing-complete. The issue is time and cost to gain equivalent functionality. We have hundreds of thousands of lines of code written in Cocoa along with years of experience, and we’d like to be able to reuse it. After all, the iPhone is running OS X.

We didn’t demand nor even expect an SDK before the iPhone’s release. This is a 1.0, and as Michael Tsai correctly states, “it‚Äôs in everyone‚Äôs interest for them to take their time and get it right”. However, we would like a bit of forthrightness from Apple, instead of continued misdirection.

From FUD about bringing down networks and other security concerns to an already-obvious “SDK”, Apple has bungled the developer relations for the iPhone. Nothing more, and nothing less. As a consumer, I’m still intrigued by the device. As a developer, I’m not terribly pleased with how things have gone.

Dear Apple,

What a WWDC 2007 keynote! We developers are a hard bunch to please, but this year you came through.

Ever since the iPhone was announced back in January, we’ve been making requests for the ability to take part in this revolutionary product. And it looks like you’ve heard our requests, and taken the initiative to fulfill them! For this we must thank you.

We know that making SDKs is not easy, and so it boggles the mind that you were able to create a complete iPhone SDK so quickly! So much access, provided so seamlessly - it is really quite amazing.

With this new SDK, we can create something neither of us could possibly have done alone, and make the iPhone platform the mobile platform to develop for.

Update (6/12/2007): See our follow-up post for more.

Panic’s own StevenF posted some thoughts on the iPhone that are interesting. For those that don’t know, Steven still uses a Newton, so he seems an ideal candidate for an iPhone.

The whole post is good, but two different quotes caught my eye:

“A thought occurred to me the other day that for as desirable as the iPhone seems to be, very few people have actually used one. It does demo amazingly well, but then so does Spotlight.”

Hopefully that’s comparison won’t hold true. He’s certainly right, however, as Spotlight demos great, and performs terribly.

The other quote is something I’ve found myself saying less concisely several times of late:

“You ever get the feeling that if Apple released the Mac today, rather than 23 years ago, that it would come with iLife, iWork, and that would be that? You wouldn’t be able to install other apps? You could buy Aperture and Final Cut from the iTunes store maybe.”

In all the hoopla about the iPhone, Steve Jobs has been very cagey about support for third-party software. Quentin has stated, correctly, that Apple should simply say that it won’t be possible at launch, but they’re considering it for the future.

Instead, Jobs has promoted FUD about making “Cingular’s West Coast network go down” and so on¹. In so doing, he’s also shown a glimpse of an attitude I believe is somewhat reflective of not just the iPhone, but Apple in general: “Apple creates everything you need.”

As a third-party software developer for Mac OS X, I’m hopeful this attitude isn’t gaining root within the company.

Footnotes:
1. The other part of that quote is “You need it to work when you need it to work”, in reference to the cell phone. To me, that sounds like a far better argument for allowing the battery to be swapped than for preventing third-party developers from making software.↩