iPhone SDK and the Audacity of Patience

Ivan Moscoso, Wednesday, July 9, 2008 @ 11:43 pm

You might be wondering what I've been up to lately.

I have been working with the iPhone SDK (the better half of three months now), and have been having more than a bit of fun.  Not only have I had to re-familiarize myself with Objective-C and the Cocoa APIs, but I have started thinking more seriously about what it means to write great mobile applications.  All of this led me to wonder about the experiences of other non-Cocoa developers (after all, there is a lot of ground to cover).  Not surprisingly, while there are a few early adopters who feel so out of their element that they are tempted to write it off, I'm confident that there are others who are like me-- psyched up and ready to go.

Unfortunately I can't get into specifics of my experience so far while holding to the NDA, other than to say that learning anything new requires patience, but ultimately if you are experienced enough, the lessons you already know about good design will move you much farther along than any choice of IDE or language or API.

The other evening, I read Marcus Zarra's somewhat  impassioned response to a lame review of the iPhone SDK from the point of view of one Windows developer.  It begins with a familiar sentiment I've heard before when verify different development communities clash:

With this recent influx of developers, most of whom we have welcomed with open arms, there are some who expect everything to be the same as the platform they came from and without bothering to learn or experiment have proclaimed our development tools to be “prehistoric”. This truly amazes me.

After catching up with the original post, I can't help but agree.  My experience has shown it to be challenging yet rewarding.  Others agree as well.  Alas, I must chime in with the alternate take on the iPhone SDK from the point of view of a non-OSX developer: I think most of us get it. Consider me part of the silent majority of developers who not only take this as an opportunity to try your hand at something different, but are in it for the long haul.  Besides-- this is fun.  Seriously.  Am I alone here?

In response to the original post which Zarra was responding to, it is one thing to be "playing a bit with the iPhone SDK lately" before firing off an uninformed post on some blog somewhere.  It's another to provide helpful tips or critiques along the way so that the larger community can benefit.  I for one expect to start seeing much more of the latter, especially from non-Cocoa developers.

And where exactly is the Cocoa Touch development community, anyway? It's not quite there yet, but give it time.  Moving the iPhone SDK out of beta will no doubt go a long way to opening up lines of meaningful communication, allowing others to share more code examples (think of something along the lines of what Flex Examples does for the Flex community). But while Apple may be setting the stage and seasoned Cocoa developers will surely lead the way, it may take a very different crowd, and possibly a fair share of new blood to mold it into something all its own.  As this week's upcoming release of iPhone 3G and iPhone App Store nears, I gotta tell you-- I can't wait.

Photo Credit:
elisfanclub
under a Creative Commons Attribution License

Related Services: iPhone Application Development, Custom Software Development

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone
2. Flash Player on iPhone gossip
3. The App Store, iPhone, and You
4. “Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse, Part 2: Displaying iPhone content to the client” Also up on IBM Developerworks
5. 6 GWT Resources for the iPhone

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1. 

   Nice comments here and I agree.
   It takes a bit of time and getting enough test apps written to get the true feel for developing on a new platform with new tools, etc and in the beginning it was a little overwhelming, but the payoff is worth it.
   As I started to used X-code more and more, I really liked what it did vs Visual Studio and found something new to get excited about every day.

   I think the early venting of frustration is simply that, in the beginning its a pain and once you get over the wall you start to see what you can really do with it,

   Comment by Jon, Thursday, July 10, 2008 @ 10:14 am

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