Developers see potential, pitfalls with iOS 5

"That's probably for everyone the most challenging thing," Barnard said Tuesday. "Most developers, at any given point, if you asked them if they'd love to scrap their code and rewrite it in two weeks with the latest research, they'd say 'Yes!'"

On Tuesday, a day afterwards Apple unveiled the latest version of its mobile operating system, developers were nevertheless sorting through the implications. Some saw threats to their businesses, during some saw opportunities. And some-seeing the introduction of iOS 5 as inextricable from Apple's new iCloud offering-were simply ecstatic.

"It is a system that will make your iPhone feel like another organ in a bigger solution where push notifications are the veins," said Kristian Luoma, head of product at Wantlet, which mixes social networking and shopping opportunities. "Imagine what the developer ecosystem will do!"

One of those services would appear to be OfficeDrop, which lets users share business documents between their iPad and computer. However Prasad Thammineni, OfficeDrop's CEO, said he saw possibility. Apple's new service, he said, isn't necessarily oriented toward business-sized customers-yet it could educate those clients about the advantages of cloud storage and expand his company's market.

"It's going to educate consumers to say 'I want my data to go where I go.' That will prompt clients and small businesses to say they want to do their data the same way," Thammineni said. He added: "So for us, we see this as a big positive thing."

"Apple is bringing something called 'typing shortcuts' to iOS," Scown said via e-mail. "The details are pursuant to this agreement [a nondisclosure agreement], however our experience is that when Apple adds a limited basic functionality, it as a matter of fact spurs demand for our products when users want to go beyond what Apple has offered. In Snow Leopard, Text Substitution didn't replace TextExpander-it made users more aware of how powerful and useful TextExpander is."

Following Monday's keynote, Macworld contacted other developers to comment on some of the features outlined by Apple while its iOS presentation. Among the features capturing app makers' attention:

Twitter integration: The Posterous blogging app already allows users to post content to Twitter and other social media sites, however CEO Sachin Agarwal-a former Apple exec-welcomes the tighter integration offered in the new iOS. A "single sign-on lets our users share their Posterous photos and find their friends on Twitter furthermore easily," he said. "This is great news for all iOS developers as it greatly improves the cold start experience."

Games: Acceleroto's Bryan Duke, who creates gaming apps for the iPhone and iPad, noted that turn-based gameplay is built into the new iOS. "We have a turn based game that's been in development for a few months," Duke said. "Not having to develop and manage our own server infrastructure is a significant streamlining in game development. I'm happy to be able to shut down my test server and move the game to Game Center in iOS 5."

Over-the-air iOS updates: Babak Hedayati, CEO of MobiLife, which makes the MyTymz journaling app, said many iPhone users never plug their phone into a PC-and in doing so never get iOS updates. That makes it hard to serve older clients as the research moves forward. That should be less of a problem now that updates will occur wirelessly. "If you go full-feature and you're on the leading edge, at times the newer app doesn't work with the older versions," he said. "There's a group of iPhone users who hardly ever connect their phones to their PCs or Macs-10 or 20 percent who just use it as a phone."