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So, last week was the Java Posse Roundup. To be honest, I actually have to struggle a little bit to remember any of the sessions. Don’t get me wrong: great people, interesting discussion, and legendary snow.

But on Thursday, Apple released the iPhone SDK.

I spent Thursday afternoon fighting through the traffic to get registered, started the download, and left it running all night and through the morning sessions. I got the .dmg with about a half hour to spare before packing up and heading to the airport. Yep, I did get to write my first iPhone app on a flight from Gunnison to Dallas.

So what can I say about it? Not that much -- Apple people are consistently shutting down public discussion on related lists (cocoa-dev, coreaudio-api, etc.) with reminders that the NDA we all agreed to prohibits any public discussion of the SDK.

So maybe it'd be OK to describe my mental state at reading through the dev docs? I'm positively giddy. Just watch the Apple event video, with an eye to the description of the software stack and its constituent pieces, and you'll realize that this isn't some compromised little toy. Programming in Cocoa for the iPhone feels like frickin' programming in Cocoa. Media-wise, QTKit may not be practical for the iPhone, but Core Audio is present and accounted for, which offers all kinds of interesting possibilities (although Jens Alfke rightly notes in a comment to me that third-party apps cannot access the user's iPod songs).

Between Core Audio and basic video playback (and all this info is in the public descriptions... I'm not disclosing details), the iPhone programming environment enjoys better media support than Java SE ever has. It's making me wonder if I've already written my last line of Java.

And the app store is probably a bigger deal. While the Java ME handset makers and carriers block access to end-users, Apple's plan lets all legitimate developers in, on an equal footing, letting each set their own price. For the small developer, Apple's 30% cut is a bargain, compared to the expense and difficulty of having to handle (through licensing or elbow grease) registration, download hosting, credit card processing, etc.

Jens thinks that we'll see 99c and $1.99 apps, and at such an impulse buy price, he's probably right. I imagine there's a large class of apps that can't demand the prices of today's boxed software (apps of a size that don't belong on the iPhone anyways), so developers make them shareware or open-source for lack of commercial viability... apps that might now be able to keep their developers going at $2 * 0.7 * n users, for an increasingly large value of n. I think it was Daring Fireball that pointed out that the iPhone is the future of the iPod, and probably a number of unforeseen new devices, all owned by potential paying customers.

I thought there'd be a good living in writing custom iPhone apps for the enterprise, but it's also highly likely that the indie developer will be able to make a perfectly nice living selling software directly to end users. In fact, assuming this app store works out, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see developers request that Apple offer a Mac App Store in iTunes. In fact, let's make that a prediction, and I'll even wager that Apple will announce it at WWDC.

Downsides? Intel-only, another in a previously-cited trend that includes the AVCHD codec in Final Cut Express and the Java 6 developer preview. I don't expect to see any new apps coming out of Apple that support PowerPC, and PPC support will probably fall away with major revisions. My main computer is a dual-G5 tower, meaning my iPhone development is going to have to take place when the rest of the family isn't using the Mini or the MacBook.

Still, worth betting one's coding future on? Well, let's put it this way: I bought an iPhone on Saturday, so I'll be ready to test my apps as soon as I get my certificate from Apple and pay them their $99. I already have plans for two direct-to-end-user apps, and am ready to take on consulting work for iPhone as soon as the enterprise plan for private apps gets revealed.

As I said in a post to the Java Posse's Google Group, I haven't been this excited about programming in more than a decade.