

Ask YC: How is the iPhone SDK? - JimEngland

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.<p>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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ikhare
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.

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chrisl99
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.

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notauser
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.

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elai
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.

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allenbrunson
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.

