The iPhone SDK was announced today, and it has a few interesting characteristics. The environment for developing iPhone apps is:

• Mac OS X
• XCode
• Objective-C
• Cocoa

Of course, some of these layers can be quite thin -- I doubt any of the games demonstrated today used Cocoa or Obj-C for more than was necessary to set up an OpenGL context. On the other hand, the common refrain from the demonstrators was: "We'd never done any Mac programming before, and... hey, look what we came up with!"

If the iPhone continues its strong showing in the smart phone market, which today's announcements seem to set it on the road to doing, there's going to be a demand for iPhone developers in the mobile space. Which means there's going to be a bunch of people learning Mac OS X development who wouldn't otherwise have given it a look.

One imagines that kind of injection of new blood can't be bad for the platform as a whole.