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Comment by marksu | Hacker News Reader

Yes – programming is fun to hop into, but just a heads up: the most difficult process to learn and master is the marketing and promotion part of releasing an app.

I feel that two blog posts linked in this article touches this subject in an interesting way: http://struct.ca/2010/the-story-so-far/ and http://blog.endloop.ca/blog/2010/08/12/100k-in-4-months-a-ni...

That said, I would recommend Corona - http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/ - for anyone wanting to give iPhone app development a shot. Much easier and fun to jump into than objective-c, especially if you want to make games, and still pretty damn powerful!

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It should be noted that the Corona SDK uses Lua on top of Objective-C and is geared for Game apps. If you already have some Objective-C or C knowledge I'd recommend Cocos2d-iphone, which is nearly pure Objective-C, with a little pure C in the rough parts.

Going the Cocos2d route will also help you learn some of the peculiarities of the platform, like memory management and object lifecycle, while giving you enough skills to jump right into pure CocoaTouch.

Nothing against Corona, it has it's place. Bubble Ball[1] was developed with Corona for example.

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/216880/8th_graders_iphone_gam...

Really not sure I agree with that. Coding is tough, and in my experience developing iOS apps well (and Cocoa apps in general to a lesser extent) is one of the most difficult forms of programming.

And as for marketing and promotion, I'd say even more challenging is coming up with an idea which doesn't need marketing or promotion :)

Yes, fair enough – I basically agree. Just posted that comment as some food for thought. I think this link was a good read, but perhaps should mention the marketing part of app production as well, if not just coding for coding's sake is the purpose. The reality is not really "you build it and they will come", which is a common mindset that might get people disappointed in the long run.

And yes – the biggest challenge is probably coming up with something original!

Amen to that! It's creating a killer app, by coding, which makes an app worthwhile enough where marketing and promotion almost become moot. I'm currently trying to update my own app after outsourcing most of the code. It's good, but I need other things that people want to talk about. That's what separates apps that sell, and those who don't.

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