June 13, 2007 at 10:24 am
"But I do have one last thing that I want to talk about, and that of course is the iPhone. The iPhone ships on June 29th. That is just 18 days from today. I believe it's 6PM in the evening, they will go on sale. June 29th, 18 days from today. Now, what about developers? What about developers?
"We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it, and yet keep the iPhone reliable and secure.
"[This is where what he should have said diverges from what he actually said] Unfortunately, we don't have a great solution at this time to show you. Now, since we have Safari running on the iPhone, you can obviously just make Web 2.0/Ajax apps that are built with the iPhone in mind, and they can be pretty great. They wouldn't, however, be able to integrate with any of the iPhone's services, which would limit their usefulness dramatically, so we're announcing today that we've added the ability for web apps to place phone calls, send e-mail, and use Google Maps. It's not as good as allowing Cocoa development or even allowing widgets, but it can be pretty cool on its own, and I would like to bring up Scott Forstall, our VP of iPhone software, to show off what this integration can be like."
Scott may have even gotten applause when he showed that you could place a phone call. I think that the mass disappointment from developers comes from how much they tried to play up what they offered as a great solution, rather than, "Sorry we can't give you what you really want right now, but here's something to make the situation a little bit better."