Morfik Builds First iPhone Development Tool
WebOS vendor Morfik has created a platform for developers to build applications for Apple's iPhone, which is being released Friday night. Morfik claims this is the first development tool for the iPhone.
Up till this point, no one had announced a development tool for the iPhone - although there have been suggestions by bloggers that Adobe AIR and Google GWT might become iPhone development platforms. However, it seems Morfik is the first to do it.
Morfik says that Scriptor, a utility built into their WebOS AppsBuilder platform, enables development of applications for products such as the iPhone. To prove that point, Morfik used Scriptor to develop iChess, a working example of an iPhone application. That link is the iPhone version, but see also http://chess.morfik.com for a browser version. It is a chess app, a favorite prototyping app of Morfik. It is running on EC2 now and can be used by purchasers of the iPhone on Friday. Also developers can download the AppsBuilder with Scriptor now from Morfik's homepage.
There is of course a lot of anticipation around third party iPhone apps - indeed there are dedicated sites for this already. As last100 recently noted, Apple will allow third party apps for iPhone - by giving them access through the web (not the OS).
What Morfik has created is a web development environment for the iPhone. But they also told us that as soon as Apple announces an API for the iPhone, then Morfik will include that into their platform.
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An API to the iPhone will be released much later, most likely; probably at least 6 months down the road. It's nice to see companies building tools like this; it sure makes life easier for us developers ;)
Apple’s iPhone will feature a special YouTube player when it’s released. (Google Maps is another Google application that’ll receive special treatment
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Backbase, an Ajax vendor, has been offering an iPhone SDK for at least a week already, so Morfik is not the first.
I think the headlines from their 26 June press release says "Backbase to Deliver the First AJAX SDK for Apple's iPhone" looks like yet to come and as you see issued only two days ago :-)
It's too bad the chess app doesn't actually work on the iPhone itself, at least when I tried it this morning. Something to do with the 5 second javascript limitation I'm guessing.
iChess works on the iPhone, but iPhone move times are rather long (to put it nicely). Chess is very maths intensive and so the time for the computer's move is very much dependent on CPU.
The time for a computer move on an iPhone is as follows (with comparative times on a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz with Safari in brackets)
Level 1: 60 sec (less than 1 sec)
Level 2: 215 sec (3 sec)
Level 3: 3000 sec (6 sec)
We did not bother testing above Level 3. We are currently working to see what can be done to optimize iChess for the iPhone.