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It looks like Apple has finally gotten around to explain the details of their much-awaited release of the iPhone SDK. Taken from a live blog of the event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs kicked off the event with an introduction of the iPhone's market share during the last quarter of last year.
Afterwards, the discussion moved on to the main event that everyone was waiting for: The details of the newly unveiled SDK. Scott Forstall, Vice President for iPhone Software, began by explaining the basic architecture of the new development package released by the Cupertino-based company.
The iPhone's OS is basically broken up into four different layers - the core OS, core services, media layer, and the Cocoa Touch framework. There was a lengthy discussion of how the four different layers work in synch with one another and how they can mesh to allow third party developers to create different applications within the limits of the iPhone's capabilities.
But just how far can Apple's mobile phone push itself with the new SDK? Forstall showed off the SDK's Interface Builder as well as the different tools developers can use to create their new applications. As a quick demonstration of the new app builder software, he created a standard "Hello World" application which can easily run on the iPhone.
While it may not be the most impressive of applications, this was something whipped up in the span of two minutes. Forstall then showed everyone some of the more complex programs which could be done given some time.
They were certainly some very impressive-looking applications featured after the initial demo, with a two-day developed program called Touch FX which allows users to distort and create special effects for images viewed on the iPhone.
Perhaps the most impressive demo app shown using the new SDK was the fully 3D OpenGL game called Touch Fighter. Given two weeks of coding, the game definitely pushed the mobile phone's capabilities to the limit as it featured a Wing Commander-style third person shooter with a decent frame rate (around 27 to 30 fps) and graphics output.
There are a couple more screenshots below featuring some of the impressive graphical capabilities of the iPhone's new SDK package. You can also read up on some of the more technical details of the SDK by checking the live blog entries found in the source link below.
  
  
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