Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

iPhone Open Application Development

analysis
Feb 1, 20081 min

This is yet another oxymoron of the day: Open iPhone. And yet, there's a whole book on the subject, or at least a Rough Cut. You have to love a book that reads like the ethnic-joke recipe for Chicken Soup. You know the joke: "First, steal one chicken." In the case of iPhone Open Application Development (O'Reilly, 2008), the joke is that the iPhone is locked, locked, locked. So Chapter 1 of the book is called Br

You have to love a book that reads like the ethnic-joke recipe for Chicken Soup. You know the joke: “First, steal one chicken.”

In the case of iPhone Open Application Development (O’Reilly, 2008), the joke is that the iPhone is locked, locked, locked. So Chapter 1 of the book is called Breaking into and Setting Up the iPhone. There are extended riffs on what to do when a new version of the OS or of iTunes locks the phone down again.

The authors of this book-in-progress claim that Apple would have to make impossibly huge changes to the iPhone OS to break the application model that they’ve pieced together by hacking the phone. I suppose they’re right.

You know what? I’ll wait for the SDK, should Apple ever deign to release it. My chicken-stealing skills aren’t what they once were.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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