Peter Hosey, fellow Adium devl, has conceived of and birthed a new microsite much more useful than my previous entry’s: aretheiphoneapispublicyet.com

Steve Jobs must be a timelord, and he’s lost the keys to his TARDIS.

And the man’s got a point.

Apple promised a new (F)NDA would be delivered to developers “within a week or so” …over 3 weeks ago. And, while that won’t necessarily affect the public availability of the iPhone documentation, it at least will take some restrictions off current developers.

Right now, developers can’t (legally) trade expertise and information on working with the iPhone’s frameworks in public. This means no developer’s forums or 3rd party code sharing/how-to sites, no blog posts on some cool trick that will make everyone’s iPhone apps that much better and, most importantly, no open source apps (the ones that exist, do so on shaky ground—ground the Adium team, at least, is unwilling to stand on).

It’s Apple’s call, of course, but allowing devs to freely swap ideas and development tricks can only help the quality of applications offered through their storefront. And, personally, makes it a much more exciting and fun platform to develop on.

Update: As explained in the link above, the iPhone APIs went public with a new iPhone Developer Terms and Conditions document on Oct. 23rd.