This question is inevitably subjective, but I will ask anyway.
I’m a PC. I’ve always been a PC. I have very little Apple expertise, although I’m completely happy in *nix. I’ve plenty of experience with development, and consider that I am able to pick up new languages and concepts faster than most of my colleagues (although ML/F# still hurts me on a regular basis). I’m reasonably familiar with C++, although haven’t touched it since the nineties, work on a daily basis, and 100% confident with C#, would consider myself advanced to expert with Java and have developed a reasonable amount of stuff in Lisp and Prolog back in the day.
We’ve had a recent request to develop an iPhone app, which sounds like quite an interesting proposition that we’d be quite interested in taking on. We have very little in-house experience with Apple platforms. Given our ignorance of most things Apple, little to no familiarity with OSX and the Apple UI paradigms and assuming we acquire the necessary hardware for development:
- What one would need to learn?
- How long would a good developer need to get up to speed?
- Are there any non-obvious expenses that might arise from pursuing this route?
Once again, apologies for the subjective nature of this question. Many thanks.
It took me a couple months to feel comfortable with it; but that was only evenings/weekends. I came from a PC/VC background and had never owned a Mac.
Objective-C is OK, if a little unusual. There are the usual gotchas that you learn once and then don’t do again. IMHO its easier to shoot yourself in the foot than C++, but it’s not a big deal to switch. I think the bigger learning curve is XCode; it’s certainly not a patch on Visual Studio, and can take a bit of getting your head around. That said, it is getting better with each release. One of the things that bugs me the most is the Mac keyboard vs the PC keyboard – particularly in the IDE – I keep jumping to the end of the file instead of the end of the line, etc. And then going back to PC you find save, etc. isn’t the same key combination. It can get quite confusing.
The Mac & OS X is a breath of fresh air – wish I’d got one sooner. I bought an iMac 24 to get plenty of screen space. It’s a lovely machine.
For Cocoa, I took the slightly unusual approach of starting with a Mac app before doing a phone app. I used the book ‘Cocoa Programming for Max OS X’ which gave me a good grounding. I then moved onto ‘Beginning iPhone Development’. I think this approach worked well for me because the Mac OS is the bigger picture, and the iphone is a subset – it helped me get context on how things had been put together. I also bought several books on linux, mac internals, etc…whatever I needed to fill the gaps in my knowledge. I found I needed to get pretty comfortable with the Terminal, and read a book on the bash shell, and polished up my ‘vim’ usage. I also discovered ‘git’ along the way and haven’t looked back.
For the phone itself, you really need a device, not just simulator; I’ve found several problems where the simulator didn’t match the device (particularly if you intend to use OpenGL ES) – for that reason I’m going to test on iphone 3G/3GS & touch. Credit where it is due; all the differences I’ve found were problems in my code which needed repairing to make it look the same on simulator vs device. If you’ve done any device programming, it’s probably the best device programming platform you’ve ever used – easy and stable, with good debugging.
I’d say the cost is one Mac + 2 iphones + ipod touch, and $200 worth of books… Haven’t found any hidden costs…