by Dan Gillmor, Director, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University
Now that Steve Jobs has bowed out of the annual (and possibly the last) Macworld Conference & Expo this week in San Francisco, there’s considerably less likelihood of any interesting, much less compelling, announcements from Apple at the event.
Too bad in a way, because lots of folks were hoping that Apple might announce its arrival, albeit late, to the netbook party.
There’s nothing new about mobile computing. In the early ’90s, the industry promised a range of devices, from tablets to mini-laptops to smaller handheld PDAs.
This weekend in San Francisco, the second annual iPhoneDevCamp 2 is underway. Whereas the first confab focused primarily on Web applications, this one has a definite native application flavor, thanks in large part to the fact that the iPhone software development kit (SDK) is out of beta and now available for developers.
When the iPhone was released in June, many developers were disappointed by the absence of an SDK for writing third-party applications on day one.
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