Question

I’m interested in starting developing on the iOS platform, after a couple of years of Android work. What are the main things that are likely to trip me up when designing/coding for iOS instead of Android?

Answer 1

I have done some iphone apps after doing Android.

• Objective-c is just another language; not at all hard to learn.
• Understand how iPhone memory works. How the ref count and AutoreleasePools stack works. This should be the most important thing to learn.
• You will love the interface builder. Creating a new screen for the iPhone is much easier.
• iPhone’s version of the Android ListView is called a TableView. More or less the same but you need to define an amount of sections.
• I love how iPhone devs use the Delegate pattern, I am using it in Android now. Pay attention to that.
• Resources can have their own folders. For example: A drawable can be in /car/model/drawable
• Adding animation to iphone objects is VERY easy. You will notice that a lot of methods have a last parameter with BOOL animated.
• Creating custom components is easier.

Things that made me lose a lot of time:

• You can send msgs to NIL.
• Logs are not as friendly as Android’s.
• You need to add every file to the project. It’s not just putting it in the correct place.
• Updates to the env means downloading 2GB every time.
• When printing logs with NSLog, NSString needs to use %@ not %s.
• Xcode has some strange behavior. The cursor moves around your screen.
• Merging commits in iPhone source is hard. The project file and the xibs always get conflicts.