Apple Thoughts: iPhone 3.0: New APIs

The one thing that Apple has been criticized for with regards to the iPhone since the advent of the 2.0 firmware is how closed it was. With 3.0, it seems like Apple is going to great lengths to open up the APIs offered to developers. Previous things that were off-limits are now not only possible, but implemented easily for developers to take advantage of.

For example, in-Application Maps are now a reality. No more clicking a "Go to Map" link that takes you out of the application and into Google Maps. An example was given of a wine bar application that had half the screen as a list of bars and the other half a map pinpointing their locations.

Other interesting tidbits included Apple opening up the iTunes library, meaning if you don't like the built-in iPod, you could theoretically write a new client to play music because you have full read access to the entire library. Apple also has finally lifted the ban on turn by turn and allowed developers access to Core Location, but in order to implement it developers will have to provide their own maps; Google's agreement with Apple does not allow their maps to be used for turn by turn GPS.

There are tons more niceties in the new OS, but one thing's for sure; Apple was obviously focused on giving developers much more access to the OS and the hardware than in 2.0, and this should make developers pretty happy in the long run, which of course means happy consumers aren't that far behind!