Double down is a phrase coined in BlackJack, however Jason Calacanis has long been applying it to the tech world. Essentially it involves doubling your bets if you hold a good hand.

Right now, anybody involved in the iPhone market in the UK holds a decent hand. With T-Mobile and Orange merging, and Orange and Vodafone to sell the iPhone by 2010, only 3 will be left out in the cold. And that is before considering the forthcoming Apple tablet.

This, of course, means there is a larger than nano sized opportunity for well executed and marketed iPhone products in 2010, assuming that users can discover them amongst the 70,000+ other apps.

So that covers iPhone - surely this implies that Objective-C is also a decent bet?

Its not quite that simple. There are a number of other methods of generating native iPhone content. Such is the size of the prize, that recently Adobe have recently thrown their hat into the ring with Notus Indeed, it appears that a number of apps already on the store have been created using this authoring environment.

Noted iPhone blogger/author Jeff LaMarche believes this will cause a flood of poorly executed Apps. This may be true, but I also believe that there are some truly excellent Flash designers out there who will raise the bar - and that will benefit everybody i.e. Inkstrumental, which I cannot wait to download!

However, its up to the Objective-C engineers out there to prove that these authoring tools cannot rival hand-coded iPhone native Apps in terms of quality and diversity. Its time to double down on Objective-C, and ensure these Apps not only rival, but surpass, those produced automatically.

Matt Brooke-Smith

Photo used under Creative Commons from Phil Romans