Thursday
Mar062008
Apple announces iPhone SDK — with Core Location!
Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 4:10PM 
Apple announced the software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone today. While you won't be able to distribute or run your apps on an iPhone yet (that'll come in June), you can download a beta of the SDK today (if you can get to the site -- it's been a bit busy). The SDK is free to download and develop with, but distributing apps will require a $99 per year fee for Apple to host and market your goods. You decide the price, free or otherwise. The even bigger news for geo-minded people, though, is that Apple is opening up their programmatic interface with the "Locate Me" feature in Maps.app. Called Core Location, developers will be able to use a documented API to develop apps with location awareness.
Reader Comments (4)
Erik, a professor at the ISchool, and I have been eagerly waiting for the release of the SDK. I am glad that it's finally out because it was scheduled to be out in February. At first glance, the Application Programming Interface (API) looks pretty promising in terms of allowing programmers to build map application and to handle XML data on the iPhone. It might even allow us to store some data in SQLite on the phone, which might be very helpful. Well, more digging to do...
On Core Location: From Apple's "Getting Started" video, we can get access to the following information:
* 3D geographical coordinate for the device:
* Latitude and longitude (includes horizontal and vertical accuracy)
* Altitude (vertical accuracy)
* Time at which the last location was determined
* The previous location that was determined