You cad, you.

But but but you guys you don’t understand! A poorly written application could crash AT&T’s network!

I’d sort of expected that Apple would end up giving developers access to a Widget-like API for the iPhone. It’s disappointing that it turned out to be true but I guess it’s sort of good news for dorky web developers like me. It’s still a complete cop-out, though. Regardless of how neat AJAX Web 2.0 (jesus I really hate referring to things as Web 2.0) applications can be made to be to look and perform, it’s still absolutely no substitute to having access to OS X’s core cocoa APIs such as Core Image, Core Video, Core Audio and Core Animation (well, assuming the iPhone is running Leopard). Which reminds me, I really should get to leafing through that Objective-C book I bought a while ago.

All of this raises one question though; why, Apple? Why alienate your third party developers in this way?

The only theory I have so far as that part of the deal Apple cut with AT&T was that Apple could be the only developer of applications for the iPhone. We’ll change our network for you if we have a single point of contact should one of your phone’s applications decide to misbehave. This makes little sense, however, because lots of devices such as Blackberry’s are capable of running native applications without any such hinderance. As far as I’m aware, there haven’t been any reported cases of any such devices causing any problems with cell networks. I don’t buy that Apple made this decision all by themselves, however. They wouldn’t alienate their developer community in such a way, surely.

Which brings us back to AT&T imposing their will on Apple in some way. Of course Steve would never publicly admit to any such thing, which is probably why he was forced to announce some limited form of application development so as to be seen to be in control of the situation. The whole debacle has seen armchair industry pundits from across the world take a break from picking doritos from their neckbeards to immediately blog up the blogosphere with all sorts of nonsense regarding the impending demise of Apple — something which I find pretty funny.

The biggest thing announced at this year’s WWDC, to my mind, is the new Finder.app. It looks great, and it seems to go a long way towards allaying some of my biggest pet peeves with it. I just pray they’ve finally stopped it excreting all over itself whenever a network share gets dropped. Time Machine also looks a lot cooler and far more useful than I thought it would be, but there still seems to be no word as to whether it uses ZFS or not but I assume Apple wouldn’t be stupid enough to completely forgo ZFS’s snapshot mechanism. But then again I assumed Apple wouldn’t be stupid enough to give third party iPhone application developers the finger.