Live from Apple’s iPhone Software Roadmap Event [full details inside]

iLounge is currently live at the Apple iPhone Software Roadmap Event in Cupertino, California. The event will begin at 10:00AM Pacific Time, 1:00PM Eastern Time. We will provide updates from this link as the event progresses.

The scene inside Apple’s Building 4, where the Event is being held. Journalists, analysts, and certain developers are currently awaiting entrance into the small Apple auditorium chosen for this event.

 

Representatives of companies such as Nike have been spotted inside. We plan to offer additional updates as the Event progresses.

 

As of 9:51AM PT, the crowd was welcomed into the Town Hall auditorium. At 10:00AM, the event began.

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO: Thank you for joining us this morning for this special event. A few statistics: for the first 8 months, the iPhone has garnered 28% marketshare of smartphone market. The iPhone is really bringing internet to mobile device for the first time. You really have the Internet in your pocket. iPhone is 71% of the US mobile browser usage.

 

Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall will be doing the heavy lifting. iPhone in the enterprise is first.

Phil Schiller: Customers have wanted to adopt iPhone into the enterprise. Genentech, leading biotech company. They have thousands of iPhones deployed within the enterprise: company says it’s a watershed event for their mobile computing. Also, universities are large customers with huge networks: Stanford has hundreds deployed from faculty and staff.

A lot of things people have told them would make iPhone huge in the enterprise. First, great e-mail integration. They want push e-mail directly from servers. They also want great calendar integration, no matter where, pushed to them. Also pushed contact information. They want more VPN, with Cisco support built right into the iPhone. They want enterprise class Wi-Fi and 802.1x, WPA2 security. And they want to be able to protect data if an iPhone is stolen. Apple is doing all of those things in the next version of iPhone software.

 

Microsoft Exchange support right into the iPhone. Licensed ActiveSync so it can go directly into the iPhone, work with corporate exchange servers. The old way of doing this is to get updates from network operations center, which needs to get info from inside of a proprietary messaging server inside of a firewall. Takes a lot of money to maintain. That’s the old way. Microsoft has a more advanced way. ActiveSync now lets you work directly with an Exchange server, which is more reliable and portable. You will get push e-mail, push calendaring, contacts, and global address lists. It will be built into the apps already on the iPhone. Same e-mail app on iPhone will work with Exchange server, same calendar. Same contacts. Provides the best solution possible, best integration.

 

Product demo, with help from Bob Borchers from product marketing (previously shown in the iPhone introduction video) sending information from a computer within the room. Information such as contact, e-mail, and calendar data is being created by Bob and sent to the iPhone, appearing right away on the iPhone’s screen. That’s what push is about—having stuff get sent directly, instantly from the server to you without forcing you to refresh or wait around. In the event of a theft, the phone can be pushed to be wiped, protecting your data.

Nike has let Apple deploy the enterprise features of iPhone on test within their site, and is happy with it; Disney has done the same. These are the features customers have been asking for, and that’s it on the enterprise.

Scott Forstall: Talking about the iPhone SDK. First, an update on web apps: Developers can built apps with web technologies. Has been incredibly successful, with over 1,000 web apps for the iPhone. They have continued to get better over the last 8 months, enabling developers to put icons on the home screen of the iPhone to take you to apps. Facebook and Bank of America have great web apps. BOA is the largest bank in the USA, and the industry meter for mobile banker. Now lets users bank from the iPhone. Already the most popular device for BOA mobile banking customers – over 25% of all mobile banking. Web apps will get even more, soon.

 

Apple will give same internal native APIs and tools to third-parties, letting them build the same SDK Apple has been using. There are a lot of pieces that make up the SDK. Mac OS X has four layers – core OS, core services, media layer, and Cocoa, the UI app framework. The first three went straight to the iPhone.

Cocoa is the best app framework out there, but it’s based on keyboard, so Apple updated it for the iPhone with a touch API, called Cocoa touch. This is the architecture of the iPhone OS.

Core OS: This is the same OS X kernel as used in Mac OS X. Optimized in certain ways, for low-memory on the iPhone, but it’s the same kernel. Networking kernel is the same. Power management is even better on the iPhone—automatic. Core Services: Address book. You can have applications talk directly to contact database. Also, you see that you can triangulate your location through Google Maps; now you have this in an API for location-aware other applications. Media layer: iPhone is a great iPod. Core Audio is part of it, on top of this you have OpenAL, an industry standard audio API for multi-channel three-dimensional positional audio, great for game developers. Built in. Video playback is seamless, using H.264 codec. Core Animation, powerful APIs to create layered animation. It was built in many ways for the iPhone; every animation on the iPhone comes from this. OpenGL Embedded is a screamer for 3-D graphics on the iPhone. Everything is heavily hardware accelerated with great, long battery life.

And Cocoa touch: built around touch as an input concept. Everything from single finger, multi-finger, to gestures. Multi-touch controls know all about accelerometer and other sensors in the iPhone. You mightn’t know that it’s a full three-axis sensor that applications can access. Web; there’s a Safari-based API. Also camera features. Years ahead of any other mobile platform for any mobile device.

A comprehensive set of tools will help developers build, debug, and create apps. Xcode was the basis, enhanced for the iPhone. Xcode is used for all apps on the iPhone. Knows all about APIs. Everything is managed for you. Integrates with your source code management system, letting you check codes in and out, create new branches, etc. You can plug your iPhone into your Mac, run the app live on your iPhone, and debug live from your Mac.

Interface builder is a tool to let you build your iPhone user interface. This is as simple as drag and drop. A complete library of all the UI controls from Cocoa touch is available. You can also localize to all languages you want to support.

Instruments is a comprehensive suite of performance analysis tools. You can compare interactions of different aspects of the app’s performance, and figure out easily how to optimize code based on realtime data from different parts of the app.

Xcode, Interface Builder, and Instruments will be joined by iPhone Simulator. This runs on a Mac, simulates entire API stack of iPhone, and includes some existing iPhone applications solely for the purpose of letting you see how they work. Full iPhone Safari is built in, with clicks simulating touches on the screen.

He’s going to build a Hello World application from nothing on stage. Single click from build to go. It’s just as easy to build live on an iPhone. Plug standard 30-pin cable into the Mac and iPhone. You can compile and drop into the iPhone with a click. Demonstrates use of touch, multi-touch, and use of the accelerometer in a new way—shake the phone to undo a change. Or use it to steer within a game application. And you can hear audio move around with 3-D positional audio. While you’re playing your game in debug mode, you can be tracking how it performs, and saving it on the computer to figure out how to optimize it—a stack trace will show you exactly where the frame rate falls, and what was happening to make it fall.

 

They’ve let a handful of coders send out a couple of engineers to see what they could do in two weeks with an SDK they have never seen before—some had not even used Mac before. Here are the engineers. Electronic Arts is first. They’re a leader in making mobile games. Travis from EA comes to the stage. They wanted to use a lot of iPhone features—video, audio, etc. They’re starting with Spore. Using accelerometer lets you control Spore. Goal of the demo is to beat things smaller than you and become bigger. You can customize the gameplay using the touchscreen, adding additional limbs to the spore character, and move things around. They’re only demonstrating 2 levels in the demo, but have gotten all 18 working already.

They threw in a cutscene just to show how the video of the iPhone could be used.

Next up is Salesforce.com. They provide software as a service, world’s leader in on-demand CRM services. Chuck Dietrich. 63,000 platform applications can be brought to the iPhone, and company’s customers will enjoy using them. Salesforce Automation (SFA) application lets you manage who and what is being sold on the road. Reps would love to see how they’re doing towards their monthly goals, providing rich reporting and analytic details to provide key metrics of business performance on the road. Goal is to let people who know how to use iPhone use apps developed for iPhone—simple. Reps can be shown exactly where to focus on sales opportunities; the iPhone lets you send more data to people if they’re detected on Wi-Fi than on EDGE network, which lets Salesforce choose how much data to push out to people on demand.

Next is AOL, which runs AIM Instant Messaging. AOL in two weeks has created AIM for iPhone. Provides status messages and buddy lists with icons instantly. Starting a conversation, live over the AIM network, was really exciting for the first time. You can swipe between multiple active chats that are going on at once. There is also a status panel so you can update what’s going on with you for your contacts. You can also pick a photo from iPhone and use it as your contact image, sending it directly to AIM servers so friends can see that as your image.

Every doctor knows about Epocrates. Company rep comes up to explain how doctors will be able to access drug formulation information, most common drugs prescribed, adverse reactions, and lots of clinical content. Also, existing functionality from company lets you do a check as to whether a new medication added to existing ones in person’s system can have a harmful effect. All of the animation between menus is handled by the iPhone. Drug identifier helps you do something new when a patient comes in and says they don’t know what the drug was they’ve taken—a drug can be IDed by matching it against known physical characteristics of a drug in the database.

Last is Sega. What would be great to bring to iPhone? Super Monkey Ball. Powerful SDK gives you ability to create 3-D graphics, tilt the iPhone to control the monkey ball on screen. Even if you don’t know what to do, you can figure out how to move the iPhone around to control it. This is not a cell phone game. It’s a full console game. And Sega underestimated what the iPhone could do: they had to bring an extra artist in to produce the graphics for the demo. The game looks sub-PSP quality but very, very good.

Once you have all of these amazing apps, how do you get them on your iPhone? Back to Steve Jobs.

Steve: What is your dream as a developer? To get it in front of every iPhone user. That’s not possible today because developers don’t have those resources. Apple will solve it by selling through the App Store, an application that will deliver apps to the iPhone through the next release of the software. Apps will be downloadable through iPhone. You can browse the Store in an interface similar to the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. If you’re interested in getting an app, it gets wirelessly downloaded through cell network or wi-fi. Also through iTunes to browse and download. If you download an app, and it’s been updated by the developer, app store will tell you, and you can instantly get an updated version of the app. The App Store will be the exclusive way to get iPhone applications directly to iPhone users.

Developers want to know the business deal. Developer picks the price, gets 70% of revenues. Apple keeps 30% for hosting, credit card, marketing and running the App Store. Pay is monthly. Developers can also give apps for free. No charge for free apps hosted through Apple. Limitations: Apple will not distribute porn, malicious apps, or ones that will invade privacy. But Apple wants to get a ton of apps out there.

How will this be delivered: it will come in iPhone 2.0 software update. It will combine SDK plus all the new enterprise capabilities. Beta release going out today to thousands of developers and hundreds of companies, to get feedback. iPhone customers will get it in June, as a free upgrade. One other part: it’s not just the iPhone, it’s also the iPod touch. Same software will run on the iPod touch too, including the enterprise features. There will be a nominal charge for the iPod touch update.

How to become an iPhone developer: Go to Apple’s website. Get the SDK for free, run it on a Mac. But then you have to join the iPhone developer program if you want to run it on an iPhone or an iPod touch. Then you can distribute the app. It’s $99 to join the developer program.

One last thing: Kleiner Perkins, a leading venture capital company.