Airplay SDK 4.1 is official

Hello everybody!

It is now official, you no longer need to own a Mac computer in order to design, develop and deploy applications to the AppStore. Airplay SDk 4.1 has proved it possible, and I have a felling that this will cause a new wave of applications on the Iphone platform in the near future.

They also added the possibility to control the simulator on the PC with the real device.

How does Remote Control work?

Any WiFi-enabled device can now be connected to the Airplay Simulator, by means of the “Remote Control” menu. The Airplay Simulator then receives selected types of input event from the device (e.g. keypad, touchscreen, accelerometer), rather than from the desktop peripherals (e.g. keyboard, mouse). The Airplay Simulator display is sent back to the device as a JPEG stream. So effectively the device is generating inputs, and receiving visual output… yet the entire application is running on the desktop machine, in either x86 or ARM simulation!

Another new feature, a little overdue in my opinion, is that you can now use a single API to access the address book of any supported device.

I have started to evaluate my copy of this SDK, and I have to say that it feels like it has a lot of potential, but is still in its infancy, meaning that it is no stranger to bugs, and the application creation process is a little bit complicated. Also the documentation is not very comprehensive, it is mainly autogenerated from the code. They do include some 100 examples of every functionality they have, but no tutorials, except from a Hello World tutorial.

It is a new product on the market, it has no real examples of success in the real world, except for a couple of really impressive games from their own Ideaworks Game Studio, but still it has an appeal to a lot of developers, the fact that you can be set free from the quirks of all the supported platforms, the fact that you can apply your already acquired knowledge to build apps is enough for me and many others.

Airplay SDK

This post is about an amazing new SDK from Airplay. The description from the official site says a lot:

Airplay SDK is a unique cross-platform development solution for advanced applications & games for Iphone, Android and smartphone platforms.

I discovered this SDK while searching the web for a free solution to develop Iphone applications on a standard PC. Everybody nows that in order to build apps for the Iphone or Ipod Touch you need a MAC for the entire development process. It also implies that you need to learn a whole new language like Objective-C, agreed that is has a lot in common with Java and C++ but still in order to be really efficient in it you need to spend some time getting adjusted to the new architecture.

This is where Airplay comes into play, it is the solution that a lot of developers have been waiting for. It allows you to develop an app entirely on a PC, in C++ using paradigms and architectures very similar to OpenGL for the 3D part, and normal object oriented for the rest.

At the moment you need a MAC computer to be connected to your network to sign the application you have done for the submition process in AppStore.

That is not all!! It can take the same code you wrote, and compile + deploy it to an Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile or Brew(Blackberry) device. Let me be more specific, by utilizing this SDK you write a program in C++, debug it in a windows device emulator and debuger, then when you are satisfied with the end result, you can choose to compile with an arm compiler, and deploy to the devices enumerated above. I have presented this article from an Iphone point of view because that is what interests me, but as you can see it is eligible for other development platforms.

At this moment it has arrived at version 4.0, and already supports GPS, multitouch, HTTP sockets, Vibration, Physical Keyboard, an UI library, Accelerometer support and much more…

It is not yet considered a matured product but that will change over time. They already promised they will soon remove the MAC signing constraint from the equation. That for me is a big plus, meaning I no longer have to save money for a very expensive MAC computer. They also announced that they will support the native resolution of the iPad in the future versions.