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.

Apple maintains a page in the Mac Pro section of its website titled Performance, comparing the time that the Mac Pro needs to complete various tasks to the time needed by previous Macs Pro and the G5.

Previously, this page used the time required to build Adium 0.89 using Xcode. As I’ve said privately before, this benchmark didn’t really show off the Mac Pro well, because Adium’s build process at that time was very linear—it did not take good advantage of multiple processors. This was one of a great many things we fixed for Adium 1.0.

For the release of their new Mac Pro, they’ve updated it to use the build time for Adium 1.2. Now, the numbers are not only more current, but better express the parallel power of the Mac Pro.

Thanks to Jesper for the heads-up.