Microsoft delivers a Bing iPhone and Mac software development kit and makes the SDK available for download on the Microsoft CodePlex community development site.Microsoft has delivered a Bing iPhone and Mac software development kit for
download on its CodePlex community development site.
In an Aug. 27 blog post, Kristin Meldahl, a product manager at Microsoft,
said Microsoft
has released the Bing iPhone and Mac SDK as an open-source project under
the MS-PL (Microsoft Public License). Bing is Microsoft's Web search engine,
referred to as a "decision engine" by the company. Meldahl wrote that
the Bing iPhone and Mac SDK provides:
The ability to easily query Bing
from within your Cocoa or Cocoa Touch application.
Perform both synchronous and asynchronous queries.
Search Bing for Web, Image, Video, News, and Phonebook results.
A description of the SDK on CodePlex said, "The Bing SDK for iPhone and
Mac is a Cocoa Framework [that] enables Mac and iPhone developers to easily
integrate Bing search results into their applications. The SDK was designed to
remove the headache of manually having to parse XML or JSON [JavaScript Object Notation] in order to communicate
with the Bing API."
The new Bing iPhone and Mac solution is essentially an Objective-C/Cocoa
wrapper for the Bing API that provides the
potential to easily add dynamic search results to applications.
"We hope that you'll be able to make some great Cocoa/iPhone apps that
harness the power of Bing," the blog post said, signed with the names of
Tom Rudick, program manager intern for the Bing API,
and Alessandro Catorcini, lead program manager for the Bing API.