Ask YC: How is the iPhone SDK? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: How is the iPhone SDK?

12 pointsJimEngland7 comments

The iPhone 3G looks very promising, with a competitive price point to attract a greater number of users and Enterprise features to directly attack RIM. There is now an opportunity to create custom applications for the iPhone.

Has anyone tried to develop an application on the iPhone SDK yet, and if so, how has it gone so far?

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Developing on an iPhone is pretty straight forward. As a first time developer on any Mac platform, I spent about a week learning Objective-C and the frameworks in general using the very nice tutorials Apple has available. It's interesting working with such a dynamic language for application programming.

I am on the developer program and one thing you should be careful about if you develop using the simulator is to use only the published APIs within the iPhone developer website. The simulator will sometimes let you use API's that are available on the Mac but not (yet?) on the phone. I've run into a couple of cases where this can be an issue.

The iPhone OS is very, very similar to Mac OS X. The UI is the biggest difference but most of your non-UI code will be similar or identical to OS X code. If you are one of the thousands of devs who aren't accepted in the $99 program, you can't run your code on the real device. You can still mess around with the simulator.

By developing for the iPhone you are mostly restricting your market to North America. It is available overseas but not very popular for a number of reasons. This may not bother you but it is something to consider. By comparison Blackberry seems to have a well entrenched user base everywhere I go, and almost every business targetted device seems to run J2ME or full blown Java.

But, with the iphone, you have a userbase that will have an easily available way to get the programs. Almost no one in canada installs java programs at all. All the money is in the default blackberry apps. It's the difference between a feature being there and it being easy enough to use.

The iPhone hasn't been out for even a year. Furthermore, over that time, it's only been available in 6 countries, and maybe only the US when it first launched last July. Now that it is going to be available in 70 countries before the end of the year, and has support for about 16 languages (versus just English), I think a developer may see 30-50% of his customers come from outside the United States.

Why is this getting modded down? He's presenting useful information that may or may not be relevant to some developers. Please mod down idiots, but not someone taking the time to present useful facts.

i've been playing around with the sdk extensively. each new beta adds a couple of new features. the iphone simulator is pretty good. if you've done any mac cocoa development in the past, it will seem very familiar.

i applied to get one of the developer keys, but apple didn't pick me. they did pick another guy i used to work with though, despite the fact that he has pretty much zero mac development experience, and no plans to develop any real apps. i'm pretty sure they handed out the keys to the first 4,000 people who asked for them, without checking qualifications at all. you can still develop for the simulator without the key, though.

i'm hoping to have a demo app done in a couple of weeks, so that i can convince some startup to hire me to do iphone development.

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