iPhone Gets Bing Search Development Kit

Microsoft has delivered a Bing iPhone and Mac software development kit for download on its CodePlex community development site.

In a 27 Aug 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.