Offer HN: My experience in iOS app development | Hacker News Reader

Offer HN: My experience in iOS app development

11 pointsSkroob13 comments

My name is Mike, and I run an indie iOS development shop called Pocket Sevens. I have a few small apps I have released on my own, but my main business is freelance and contract work. I run several projects, for a variety of different clients, in a variety of different areas. My most solid areas involve working with web services, animations and custom UI. The only thing I don't really know is OpenGL ES, so games are pretty much out.

I've enjoyed reading HN for a while now, and I'm fond of the intelligent culture that seems to have evolved here. I have been looking for a way to give back a bit, and to expand my technical writing skills as well. This is as much for me as it is for you :) I have at least some expertise in this area, and I'm happy to share.

So if you have a question about anything iOS related, I'm willing to answer to the best of my ability. If you have a piece of code that's troubling you and you'd like another set of eyes on it, let me know. If you have an idea for an app and want some advice or direction, I'm happy to help. (I'm unable to agree to any NDAs in this case, but I would consider any communication private; nor do I have any intention of stealing any ideas. I have plenty of my own that I should be working on instead anyway!)

If you're interested in taking me up on this offer, you can comment here, or if it's more private, sensitive or just easier for you, you can email me at hn@pocketsevens.net. I'll reply as soon as I can.

Have you used core text at all? Particularly, I'd like to implement some highlighting features inside text views. I'd also like to implement a hybrid text view / drawing canvas (ability to draw over a text view, while retaining scrollability, etc.).

I haven't worked with Core Text directly. Cool ideas though, if you need a hand with anything specific there let me know and I'll look into it. :)

Hey Skroob, thanks for offering your experience. How do you find clients for contract and freelance work? Also when did you feel you were comfortable enough with the iOS api to start freelancing?

Happy to do it! This is the question I've gotten most. It's probably worth a future blog post, but I'll give you the short answer I've been giving others so far. The best thing is word of mouth. Once you have some happy clients, they will tell others. Mention to friends and other developers that you know that you're looking for contract work, and they will very often pass your name along to people. Sell your own apps, sometimes people will find them, contact you and ask you to do stuff that is similar. Finally, give boards like Elance a shot, but don't sell yourself short and take $15/hr jobs if you can't live on that.

As for your second question, I'm never 100% comfortable about this, which is kind of fun. I never know what someone is going to ask me to do next, but the API docs are good, the community is helpful and it's a fun platform to work on. There's lots of answers out there if you need them. However, I can tell you there are important things to know. For one, memory management is vital on iOS devices. The OS can and will remorselessly kill your app for using too much, without warning. Memory overuse is a crashing bug, do whatever you must to squash it dead.

Do you think Sencha is worthwhile?

Is learning to code natively always preferred, or do you respect the idea of generalizing your platform?

I haven't looked into Sencha but I have seen things like Appcelerator and Mono Touch. I personally have no problem with people who want to use some other framework to write iOS apps. It's good to know other languages (something I'm personally way behind on; I have a beginner's knowledge of Ruby and thats about it right now) and if Apple will let you build and sell apps written in other languages, I say go for it.

Just FYI. As far as game programming there is cocos2d it works really well and is very easy to use.

Thanks. I looked at cocos2d a long while ago but never put anything into it. Maybe I should look again.

Do you have any experience with Core Data (particularly migrations)?

Some. They can be… complicated. Simple migrations, like adding an attribute to an entity is pretty simple, but if you're making large changes to a model they can get hairy.

What advice do you have for marketing your apps?

Unfortunately this is one of those things I can't speak to very well, because I wouldn't consider my marketing efforts for my own apps to be successful. For me, it's been trying to build the best apps I can, and then send them along to friends and other developers I've met and hope they get some use out of it and spread the word. So far, nothing has taken off, but my focus is mostly freelance at this stage anyway so I haven't pushed much. My free to try "Safari to iPhone/iPad" app, Previously, has about 10k downloads, 5k active users, and a substantially lower number of paid upgrades to the full version.

if you need someone "to make a game for iphone" we can team up

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