Developers are flocking to the iPhone software development kit with 100,000 downloads, Apple said Wednesday. “Developer reaction to the iPhone SDK has been incredible,” added Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing.
Schiller also said a million people watched the video of last week’s SDK launch, “further demonstrating the incredible interest developers have in creating applications for the iPhone.”
Several developers commented on their plans.
“We’re excited that the iPhone expands the ways our customers can solve key financial tasks wherever they might be,” said Rick Jensen, a senior vice president at Intuit.
Scott Rubin, sales vice president for Namco Networks, said his company plans to release the classic Pac-Man and Galaga games.
NetSuite Vice President Luke Braud said his company is “excited at the opportunity to give every iPhone customer access to their critical business data anytime, anywhere.”
Ethan Einhorn, who demonstrated a version of Super Monkey Ball at the launch, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he was surprised at the iPhone’s graphic power. “The thing that was very exciting for us was we could make something closer to a console experience in a mobile game,” he said.
Meanwhile, hackers say they have already performed a “jailbreak” on the latest firmware included with the SDK. The iPhone Dev Team announced Wednesday that it had hacked firmware version 1.2, which will be deemed 2.0 in June, so it can run apps not approved by Apple.
Some developers are dismayed by some shortcomings in the SDK, most prominently the inability to run applications in the background. Third-party applications that developers create won’t be able to multitask, even though Apple’s own applications can.
“The Apple SDK, as many have come to find, has arguably crippled much of the functionality that set the iPhone apart when first released. Even simple features like the…