Development for Palm devices has been in the doldrums for several years now. The success of the Palm Centro smartphone is relatively small in comparison with Palm’s previous market domination. Developers who could rewrote their software for Windows Mobile and other platforms. Developers of development software had a harder time, some of them closing shop altogether.

Now the Apple iPhone/Touch has become a platform worth targeting for mobile applications. With 6 million first generation and 1 million 3G iPhones shipped it is already a customer base to be reckoned with.

There is a catch though. Although the iPhone SDK (Software Developer’s Kit) costs $99 a year, there is another cost. The SDK requires an Intel Mac running Mac OS X Leopard. For software developers who have been focusing on Palm and Windows Mobile development, this almost certainly means buying new hardware. Fortunately with Boot Camp (included with Apple Inc.’s Mac OS X v10.5) developer’s can dual boot their Mac’s into Windows XP or Vista, which makes it more of a multi-purpose development machine. Parallels Desktop for Mac allows running of Windows XP or Vista in a window on a Mac.

There are a couple of companies which have announced software for the iPhone. They already have their software running on numerous other mobile platforms.

Posted on July 16th, 2008 by mervyn