iPhone SDK Halo Effect Predictions
Releasing an Objective C-based SDK for the iPhone will lead to a larger market share for Apple’s desktop and laptop computers.
People have been interested in developing OS X applications for a long time, but the learning curve associated with picking up a new language (Objective C) and a new set of platform APIs (Foundation Kit) have been too big a deterrent for a lot of developers. The market share compared to Windows has been too small to warrant the high barrier to entry for a lot of mainstream developers and (more importantly, IMO) businesses.
The Yellow box APIs provided a way to increase the return on a company’s investment, because it allowed Cocoa applications to run under Windows. At some point Apple remembered that they are a hardware company and realized that Mac-only software meant people had to buy a Mac to run it, and scrapped Yellow box.
The iPhone SDK changes that. A lot of handheld software companies are eager to sell iPhone applications. iPhone has a very large chunk of market share and it is well worth their while to climb the Objective C and API learning curves in order to have a presence on it.
There is going to be a halo effect around this: once people have learned Objective C, developing desktop applications is going to be a much more straightforward process. As a result of this I predict that there is going to be a lot more competition in the Mac development industry, directly resulting from the release of the iPhone SDK.
This is going to result in a *much* larger Objective C development community. People are going to have to learn it in order to get their applications to market. There will likely be some degree of interest in using Objective C for other platforms as well - perhaps we will see a general surge of interest in the language itself throughout the software industry as a whole. Not necessarily a dominant presence, but one that extends beyond the reach of Apple products into other platforms.
We shall see