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Comment by lukev | Hacker News Reader

This is unfortunate - that seems like a lot of work for a relatively simple, albeit well-done app.

I might have to think twice about whether I want to do an app to complement a webapp I'm doing in my spare time (no prior experience on iDevice development).

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Don't let a professional app like Twitterrific discourage you from taking a dive into iDevice dev.

Prior to writing my iPhone app, I had 0 experience doing iPhone or Objective-C dev (I do have a comp sci degree which did help a ton.) All told it took me and my partner around 70 hours of dev/design work (some of that was me reading HCI guidelines for the iPhone.) We spent around $200 on an icon package, $75ish on an anti-hack kit, and had some server costs that got absorbed elsewhere.

It was a fun project and something we'll continue to play with in our spare time.

What is an anti-hack kit?

I hope I didn't confuse... that should be anti-crack kit. Specifically the kit uses various means to detect if the application had been cracked.

When applications are cracked there are various tell-tale signatures that are left behind such as modified plist files. These signatures are detectable by the kit, which I can check on via a call to the kit's "isCracked()" method. I collect this statistic, and if I wanted to could cripple the app.

Is there no way to validate code-signing on your app bundle? I would think that would still work even if the signing requirement was patched out of the OS.

You would have to make your own code do the validation, since jailbreaking makes all code sign checks pass if they follow a basic structure.

Out of curiosity, what kit are you using? I'd be interested in giving something like that a try.

I'm using the one developed by Oliver Drobnik called AntiCrack: http://www.drobnik.com/touch/anticrack/

I'm guessing he's referring to off-the-shelf anti-piracy software.

I don't think it's Cocoa that's slowing them down, so much as that it's a really, really, really good phone app.

It takes more time than anyone really thinks to do anything really well.

That has nothing to do with Cocoa.

It would take me as much time to do a Rails app well as it would for someone who has as much experience in Objective C as I do in Rails (that is, not nearly as much as I do with Cocoa).

Exactly. That was my point as well. It takes a lot of time to do anything very well.

I think you'll find that's actually pretty damn efficient for such an app. If you add interaction with a client changing their mind, etc (v. common..) then it could easily be higher. Much higher.

> This is unfortunate - that seems like a lot of work for a relatively simple, albeit well-done app.

It takes a lot of work to make things look simple. And even more to make them well-done.

Hear hear. The user interface for my first app took me 3x as long as I expected, despite finding (unexpectedly) that Cocoa Touch to be one of the nicest API's I've encountered. It was because I re-built it several times to make it feel "right", and after watching users try it. Each time it got simpler. It probably only took a few days worth of coding for what went into the final app (the editing interface, not the whole thing) but the road to get there was long. I guess that's the value of an experienced UX designer -- they can do that work beforehand with paper and intuition.

The simpler you make something, the more perfect the execution of each of the remaining elements have to be, because your attention is now laser-focused on them.

Not unlike the old saw:

"I'm sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have time to writer a shorter one."

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