Apple has announced on
its iPhone Developer Program page that they will drop the NDA covering the iPhone APIs. This means that we should, at some point, be able to start work on an iPhone version of Adium.

Some important points:

• Apple has not dropped the NDA yet. The announcement says that Apple will distribute a new developer agreement “within a week or so”. Until they do, the NDA is still in effect.
• We don’t yet know what the new developer agreement will say. It’s always possible that the new agreement will include some other clause that prevents open-source software. We won’t know until we see it.
• An iPhone version of Adium will not happen immediately, nor soon. From the little public information that Apple released (and the many tidbits that iPhone developers leaked in defiance of the NDA), we know that the iPhone development interfaces are significantly different from those on the Mac. We will need to rewrite almost the entire application. The Adium for iPhone page has more information.

This is a long-overdue step by Apple, and we’re glad they’ve taken it. We look forward to one day writing and using the iPhone version of Adium.

Thank you, Apple.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 12:09 PM by Peter Hosey and is filed under Apple, awesome, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.