I'm 22 and the BARC hamfest is in 14 days... bought 4 vendor spaces...

The SDK is already free. It's the getting in the app store (maybe) that costs $99

meant to post this in the thread above, sorry.

I've got an external sony dual layer dvd+/-RW that OS X 10.3-10.5 worked perfectly with via USB or firewire too.

Er... there were separate pins for usb and firewire on the iPod... looked at that connector lately? A lot of pins... they didn't "double" in a single connector, to say, besides the fact that the connectors are physically different and can't "double" .... and the voltage/signal spec is different. sure, i'm sure you could make a port with adapters or something or put an ipod port on the laptop but...that'd be insane and so easy to break!

The IO80211 inteface the airport status software pulls from is not open source, and requires reverse engineering to get the driver to pass data to/from it to provide normal airport interaction. There's just no easy way to do it unless apple takes your driver and polishes it up with their own interfaces. Same thing happened with "OS X " compatable wifi cards i've bought in the past.... required the included program to set it up. Quite frankly, there is are ways to do it - but it's just so much easier to it this way.

Downloadable version instead of pre-packaged, you know..... You can still get the same thing, you just have to take the extra step to download it... and if you are in a situation where you can download email, you can download the client, as well. :)