What is the iPhone SDK?
An iPhone is a wireless phone and portable data assistant made by Apple. It has a number of features such as: phone, web browser, email, music player, maps with directions, etc… You can purchase an iPhone from most AT&T Wireless reseller stores.
SDK is an acronym that stands for Software Development Kit. A software development kit is a bundle of programs that software developers use to create Applications (Apps) that run on targeted platforms, in this case iPhones. SDKs exist for most programming languages. In addition to creative development programs SDKs normally include extensive documentation as well. This documentation normally is the primary source that developers use to obtain detailed knowledge on how to program for the platform that the SDK targets, in this case an iPhone, iPad, and iTouch).
The Apple iPhone SDK is designed to work with the Cocoa and Objective-C programming languages. There are other iPhone SDKs as well that were not written by Apple that offer the same development program support for other programming languages. The .Net one is called MonoTouch. At minimum SDKs include a compiler and documentation. Some include other programs as well, programs such as an iPhone simulator and testing tools.
The Xcode development environment is normally used to develop iPhone Apps, which is included in the latest version of the Apple iPhone SDK.
Development of iPhone applications requires an Intel-based Macintosh computer running Mac OS X v10.5 or later.
The iPhone SDK can be downloaded at http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
MonoTouch SDK can be downloaded at http://monotouch.net/
The iPhone SDK is a software development kit that will allow third parties to create applications that can run directly on the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The kit is significant because Apple can’t possibly anticipate, nor produce, all the applications that people might want to use on an iPhone. And some of those applications will convince people who weren’t sure about the iPhone to buy it.
