I’ve heard a few complaints about the new iPhone SDK, but I just realized (re-watching the demos) that Apple chose OpenGL and OpenAL. That’s big. They’ve picked a beautiful pair of APIs and put them in the hands of thousands of excited developers.¹ They’ve also picked other great tools like SQLite, Bonjour, and gcc … things that are vital for the health of the software industry. Yay standards!

1. Compare to Microsoft’s seemingly-insane approach of NIH ↩