Apple promised a revised iPhone NDA “within a week or so” on Wednesday, October 1, 2008.
Apple posted a new iPhone Developer Terms and Conditions document, with a “Last modified” date of Monday, October 20, 2008, on Thursday, October 23, 2008.
Today is Friday, October 24, 2008.
The iPhone Developer Terms and Conditions contained a clause that said, essentially, that any information that Apple gives to a Registered iPhone Developer but not the public is Confidential Information, and that it is a breach of the agreement for the developer to disclose such information. This clause was Apple's NDA for the iPhone platform. (The Mac developer Terms and Conditions contain a similar clause.)
Until Apple posted a new NDA with a different clause, the iPhone APIs were Confidential Information, so it was technically a breach of the NDA to talk about them in public, or even to publish open source code that uses them.
This impaired iPhone software development for months.
From the moment Apple promised to publish an amended NDA that doesn't cover released iPhone software, many people openly defied the NDA (many of them believing that it was already gone) in the three weeks before Apple finally did lift it. I hope that Apple does not take action against these people, because it's Apple that promised to ease the restrictions and took three weeks to do it.
Apple resolved this problem by publishing on 2008-10-23 the amended NDA that they promised at the start of October 2008. The other way would have been to make the iPhone API documentation available to the public, as they did years ago with the Mac API documentation.
This means two things:
Good on Apple for keeping the promise they made. Finally, Wil Shipley's NDA tweet has come true: The FUCKING NDA is now well and truly dead.
Thanks to Ryan Govostes and Brandon Walkin for telling me about the MacRumors article heralding the NDA's death.