Mon, 09 Jun 2008 WWDC: Application devs wheel out demo apps

Apple's bursting out during its WWDC keynote, demonstrating the usability of its iPhone SDK and wheeling out numerous developers who are building applications.

With over 250,000 downloads of the SDK so far, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, observed: "Developer reaction to the features, power and simplicity of the iPhone SDK has been incredible. We are seeing some truly amazing native apps from our developers and think users are going to love the breadth and depth of the applications available from the App Store."

Applications exhibited during WWDC include games, communication tools, location-sensing technologies, music-making applications, and tools for medicine.

Sega took the stage to show off of the full version of Super Monkey Ball, a game with over 100 levels which is set to cost $9.99 when the App Store launches.

Also in games, Pangea demonstrated Enigmo and Cro-Mag Rally, the latter being a driving game completely controlled by the iPhone's movement sensor. Digital Legends demonstrated a lush 3D fantasy title developed in just two weeks.

Additional highlights included a native auction client for eBay, and Loopt - a location-aware service that shows users where their nearest friends are on a map and easily lets them contact them in multiple ways. A news-gathering service from Associated Press was also demonstrated.

The latter application offers news from multiple sources, is location-aware in order to furnish users with local information, and also offers video and images. It also enables 'citizen journalism', offering the capacity for users to send news stories and tips into the service.

The biggest "oohs and ahs" so far went to Band, a musical instrument for the iPhone made by a UK developer. This includes a virtual piano, drums, 12-bar blues 'instrument', and a bass - it sounds great and lets you record music too.

Applications for medicine, blogging and more all made their debut at the show - though perhaps the saddest news so far is that iPhone Software 2.0 won't ship until "early July", Apple CEO Steve Jobs said.

"The iPhone SDK has given us an excellent set of tools and APIs to create mobile extensions for FIM's entire portfolio of web brands including MySpace, IGN and Photobucket in the near term, and other properties such as FOXSports.com down the road," said John Smelzer, senior vice president of Mobile for Fox Interactive Media. "The popularity of the iPhone, along with the high demand for applications, gives us an amazing opportunity to create ground-breaking mobile experiences."

"As mobile developers with primarily J2ME and BREW experience, we were up and running with the iPhone within two weeks," said Jonathan Backer, manager of Mobile Engineering, The Walt Disney Company. "The hardware is stable and full-featured, while the software development tools are intuitive and represent a level of polish rarely seen in the mobile arena."