On the last day of Macworld 2007, I got a chance to speak with Alykhan Jetha, CEO of MarketCircle Inc, developers of Daylite and Billings, two very robust business management tools for the Mac.
MarketCircle Inc, was at CES this year launching their new invoicing app, Billings 2, which is to custom invoices as Apple’s Pages is to Newsletter layouts. Billings allows you to create some extremely professional looking invoices for your customers in a matter of minutes, and if you’re a freelancer or small business owner, Billings is well worth a look.
With all the talk about a lack, or limitations of, 3rd Party developement for the iPhone, I wanted to talk to an actual developer and see what he had to say about it, and what his feelings were. AJ seemed like the perfect person to ask. His application, Daylite 3, seems like a must-have 3rd party application for the new device, and he had already commented on his blog about Apple’s newest portable. Thankfully, he had a few minutes to speak with me.
Q. How excited or surprised were you guys about the iPhone?
Well first of all, we heard all those rumblings that Apple was going to come out with an iPhone and all that kind of stuff, so we were kind of expecting it, but then when we saw it, or when I saw it, and what it was built on and how it works and all of that, I was floored…I mean, this thing is cool….and I don’t tend to get excited about phones….because of the nature of the ones that are out there. You know, they work, but they have aweful user interfaces.
Q. Now, I read on your blog that you’re going to be able to sync Daylite with the iPhone…
AJ: That’s our estimation. We strongly believe we can do that….but Apple hasn’t said anything directly…we just can’t believe that they wouldn’t allow that. So our engineers are working now as we speak on our sync services support. So we’ll be having sync services intergration soon. I think by the time the iPhone ships we should be in good shape for that, maybe we’ll need a month or two of testing after it ships, but around that time we should have something that works.
Q. Daylite is a powerful business application for the Mac, and it seems like there are some really great things that you could do with it in conjunction with the iPhone if you were allowed to develop for the platform. With you not currently being able to develop for the iPhone…is that something that you want to do in the future…is it something that bothers you as a developer that you can’t do now?
AJ: Oh absolutely. Absolutely we want to do something. I was voicing myself to Apple today on that. That we need to get an SDK out. I can understand how they might not have an SDK for maybe a year or so because it’s just fresh out of the box, and there are a lot of things they need to flesh out….before they can have an SDK, and that’s understandable, but eventually they should have an SDK out. We need it.
Q. Do you really think that they’re going to open the iPhone up at some point?
AJ: I don’t know. I am certainly hoping so. Currently the vibe I’m getting is that it’s close, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking that the only reason that somebody would go to another platform such as a RIMM, or a Simbian or a Nokia, or one of those would be because you can have custom apps on those machines, but I can’t see Apple leaving that to those vendors considering the under pinnings that this phone has.
You can check out all of MarketCircle’s software by clicking here.