Apple recent announcement of the iPod Touch, which mimics the interface and design of the iPhone, opens up a whole new world for developers and hackers looking to more with both devices.
Although Apple didn't announce the developer SDK that many were hoping for, most developers believe that the new iPod Touch runs on the same variant of OS X that is used in the iPhone, which means the iPod Touch will likely be as hackable as the iPhone.
However the Mac development community has seen a whole new breed of developers pop up around the iPhone — namely web-developers — who are creating apps that work not just on the iPhone (and now the iPod Touch) but potentially any touch screen device, which gives them a potential market that's much larger than just Apple devices.
While many developers would still like to see an official SDK, so far Apple is sticking to its guns and touting web-based apps for both devices.
Joe Hewitt, whose iUI web development kit enables developers and designers to quickly convert existing sites into iPhone-optimized sites, thinks the web is the way to go. And Steve Jobs seems to agree, in his demo of the new iPod Touch he showed off the iPhone-optimized version of Facebook, which Hewitt helped develop.
"The web is where it's at," says Hewitt, "I am much more interested in seeing Apple expose new web-based APIs that allow us to exploit the touch screen, camera, accelerometer, and local storage."
The promise of replacing desktop apps with web-based equivalents has been a slow process, but it just might end up with the mobile market, and Apple specifically, leading the way. Many of the native applications for the iPhone have web-based equivalents and for the average user, accessing apps via the web is much easier than installing hacked apps.
Of course web-based apps aren't as fast native apps, which is one of the reasons developers have gone ahead and created native apps even without Apple's support and that trend is likely to continue and probably grow with the new iPod Touch.
In fact, since the iPod Touch is free of AT&T, and thus developer's don't need to worry about supporting the archaic EDGE network, it could pave the way for even more native applications.
Alex Schaefer, part of the team behind ApolloIM, a native iPhone application that adds instant messaging features, says the group has already begun changing their code to make the EDGE components optional.
But just because the iPod Touch is free of the AT&T network restrictions, doesn't mean Apple is opening up to outside developers. Schaefer doesn't think Apple will ever open the devices to the outside world, "as a developer, I would love to see that happen, but I don't think it will."
Schaefer isn't just speculating, he and others have spent a lot of time looking at the internals of the iPhone and has concluded that "it's pretty clear that Apple never intended for the 'hackers' to break in and poke around as they have."
Of course what Apple intends and what its users actually do are two different things. As Schaefer points out, a hacker by the name of Nightwatch and the rest of the team at the iPhone Dev Wiki have "created a working SDK for a platform that wasn't intended to have one," no small accomplishment to be sure.
And with the iPhone merged with the iPod in the form of the iPod Touch, other Mac developers are beginning to look at the Apple's new mobile platform with increasing interest. Buzz Anderson, who develops PodWorks, an OS X application for retrieving songs off your iPod, thinks the iPod touch will open up the iPod platform on a whole new level.
The opportunities to develop for [the iPod] have, until now, been very limited," says Anderson, "the idea of being able to develop applications that actually run on an iPod, and to be able to leverage my existing Mac programming expertise to do so, is
incredibly enticing."
And the lack of an official development platform from Apple isn't likely to discourage Mac developers. Anderson says, "you can bet that, Apple SDK or no, I will be working on apps for the iPhone in the coming months."