Redmond, Washington — As Microsoft’s newest search engine Bing attempts to build up its brand, it jumps ship to those pesky Apple formats as another avenue for boosting usage of its Bing search engine. On Thursday, the Redmond, Washington software titan released a software developer kit (SDK) designed to make it easier for iPhone developers to build access to Bing into their applications.
Bing, while still in its infancy, has fared pretty well gaining interest and usage from the online community. However, Microsoft wishes to move away from just the desktop browser space and is spreading itself in all directions to get more people using the search service.
Thus, using the SDK, a developer can create an iPhone or Mac application that searches Bing for Web information, images, videos, news and phonebook results. So, Microsoft released a Bing SDK in Cocoa Framework for Mac and iPhone developers, allowing them to easily add Bing search functions to their apps.
The SDK is a Cocoa Framework, which means Mac and iPhone developers can easily be able to combine Bing search results into their applications. Microsoft says it was designed to “remove the headache” of manually having to parse XML or JSON in order to communicate with the Bing API.
“The 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. We hope that you will be able to make some great Cocoa/iPhone apps that harness the power of Bing,” revealed Tom Rudick, program manager intern, Bing API, and Alessandro Catorcini, lead program manager, Bing API.
Google is the default search engine in the iPhone’s Safari browser, and users can decide to switch that to Yahoo. Otherwise, if iPhone users want to access Bing today they have to type in the URL.
Now, while there may be some who would consider using a Microsoft product, there are plenty of others who will appreciate that Bing is fresh and new compared to older search properties like Yahoo! and Google.
In essence, Microsoft is making it easy for developers to integrate the Bing search experience into applications designed for iPhone or Mac OS X, empowering users to enjoy dynamic search results. This is the stable version of the software development kit, Microsoft noted. Developers seeking to leverage the Bing SDK for iPhone and Mac OS can do so by downloading it from CodePlex. The Redmond company is offering the SDK under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), which is an open source license.
While Microsoft and Apple compete in the mobile-phone market, other Microsoft services and applications are already available on the iPhone. For instance, the iPhone supports Microsoft’s ActiveSync to let people access their Exchange e-mail. In addition, Microsoft’s Live Labs group released an iPhone application for Seadragon, the technology that lets users browse through potentially very large images.
The Bing SDK for iPhone and Mac is currently up for grabs via the Redmond company’s repository for open-source projects, CodePlex, along with links to all of the appropriate documentation, and is approaching nearly 1,000 downloads after a couple of days. A sample app (image search for the iPhone) is there for download as well.