From quaketown to shaketown for WWDC

Opinion

Layton Duncan, the world's first iPhone developer (before the first iPhone even came out in New Zealand), is still based in his ravaged city of Christchurch, but managed to make the pilgrimage to Apple's annual World Wide Developers' Conference, for perhaps the fifth time, in San Francisco.

It must have felt odd heading to another city prone to earthquakes, but Layton said it stayed thankfully shake-free while he was there.

With his hardware - servers, an iMac and other equipment - still trapped in the Red Zone, he's been working from home, and managing to keep his Polar Bear Farm app development business going from a MacBook Pro.

"Luckily, I managed to grab my laptop on the way out [in this year's initial, devastating quake]. I've been working on that, and borrowed, equipment. The insurance companies won't pay out, because they're waiting for access to assess damage, so we just have to wait." I could hear the frustration in his voice.

"We can't go out and replace equipment because we don't know whether insurance will pay out. And we don't know what equipment is retrievable, since we can't get access either."

You can imagine the problem.

So the World Wide Developers' Conference (WWDC) was a welcome break from all that's happening in Christchurch.

"There are definitely some very nice things about iCloud, and in much more depth than just a music synching service. The last two years have been all about iOS, but this year was much more of a mix of iOS and OS X [Lion]. iCloud is across all Apple's platforms - they're at a point where they can simultaneously release features across all of them."

I asked if he could foresee a time when an iOS app could also run in iOS X, say like a widget in Dashboard. "Well, OS X is still very much mouse dominant. It's kind of changing, with Apple adding gestures, but not as far as the kind of direct manipulation you have in iOS. So as a developer, although the two systems share the same code base, there's still a very clear distinction between the user interface layer of each."

So for now, Layton can't see many developers building something that works for both platforms, although it's clear the two operating systems are on paths that are converging.

On changes for the end user in iOS5, he says "There are lower level developer things that will be introduced in iOS5 that won't particularly be visible to end users. But some of [Polar Bear Farm's] utility products will definitely benefit from iCloud.

The kind of ease - that problem of synching across devices in which developers have companion apps on the desktop and they want to shuffle files between them, well, there's been virtually nothing on that front until iCloud, making developers try and roll their own solutions until now. iCloud promises to be a lot more user friendly in that regard."

That's long been a criticism of iOS - even getting an Apple Pages document from Pages on an iDevice into Pages on a Mac is hardly an obvious or intuitive process. So that will be welcome when the system ships for public consumption. For the rest, iOS5 shouldn't provoke massive code rewrites.

"Apple hasn't removed anything on previous iOS updates, so there's no requirement to update apps in the development system. And Apple only releases stuff when they're sure it's ready. So there's no burden to update, but the features Apple's engineers do add are usually compelling enough to make you want to update and add new features to your apps."

I asked if he ever developed for Android, or considered doing so? "No. And no. Apple most definitely has motives for promoting app development and they don't always align with developers, but from a developer point of view, the process for developing apps with Apple's tools is far more fun than with other platforms."

Layton does know - he has a degree in Electrical Engineering from Canterbury University.

"Android doesn't interest me because it's a commodity operating system, attempting to be all things to all people. To me, that represents too many compromises for writing apps. You're never guaranteed a base specification for a device - you might have something with a touch screen, something with touch and a physical keyboard ... and there's the different screen resolutions to contend with, and different performance characteristics. That's a minefield - the tedious side of development you want to minimise as much as possible - which is what Apple does by providing the top-to-bottom hardware-software solution."

So how did this year's conference stack up compared to the others he's attended?

"I think this WWDC which will have the furthest-reaching ramifications. I think a lot of other companies are going to be surprised, including Google. But everything other than the keynote is under NDA, so I can't tell you.

"The big thing for me was definitely iCloud." Layton paused. "It's going to be ... " he pauses: "Very interesting."

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com