Apple has posted a job request on its web site to hire an "iPod Xcode Engineer for Embedded Systems". Does that mean an iPod software developmeent kit is in the works?

Here is an extract :

"The iPod Division is looking for an individual who will be responsible for improving and maintaining the IDE for embedded applications. The person in this position will be required to work closely with the Mac OS X Xcode team."

In short, Apple is likely to be planning to release a software development kit allowing developers to make custom software for the iPod. We can guess it will either be included in a future version of xCode as part of the API and xCode's IDE or will be available on the Apple Developer Connection web site as a SDK. Another, but less likely, option is that Apple delivers this kit only to selected partners.

At the moment, the only resource available to make some custom features for the iPod, is the Notes Reader feature documentation that developers can download in PDF format through the ADC web site, in the hardware/ipod section. However, this feature is limited to simple HyperText intelligence which isn't enough to create sophisticated software for the iPod.

This simple documentation is already used by many software developers who created some great applications providing automatic information retreiving from the net and translated to iPod Notes. You may checkout Michael Zapp's iPod It and Kevin Wojniak's Pod2Go. If this SDK is really released, we can hope many new applications will quickly arrive.