Apple Scraps the iPhone Developer NDA

A major criticism of Apple was that they had kept the pre-launch NDA for the SDK etc. This was attracting a lot of criticism, authors were able to not write books etc and developers had to pass information quietly between themselves not publish on blogs etc.

Well no more! As of today Apple officially announced that the NDA for released software (theirs!) is being dropped and most developers will receive updated NDAs that will let them reveal programming information. By this I guess they mean the SDK and code in examples highlighting use of iPhone features such as GPS, accelerometers, webkit etc. It at least leaves me freer to write about developing for iPhone!

Unreleased software by Apple is still covered by NDAs. Of course this eases pressure on Apple but there still remains valid criticism of their policy on the App Store. The philosophy behind not allowing some applications seems to be if it clashes with something Apple has done or might do then it's a no no. But you don't find out until they reject it and guess what, your rejection is covered by a NDA! I think this could have been done a lot better! Now the NDA is gone, Apple should spend some time specifying exactly what isn't acceptable.

If you're considering learning Objective-C but don't have a Linux box or Mac, try MinGW on Windows and install Objective-C. I've added that to the Windows Tools and Utilities.

Link to Windows Tools and Utilities