The first demo of the Workstreamr app was given on Friday and Monday. Just before the Friday demo, Manish had a small announcement to make. To try to build a client, as the client we currently are building, that would run on an Apple iPhone. The reward would be an iPhone itself (so ha says) ! I, along with others were definitely interested. The browsed through the latest SDK that Apple had released for the iPhone and came to understand that the SDK needed a Mac for the development. That clearly justified my buying a Mac !!
I downloaded the SDK. A 1.3 Gb dmg file ! When installed, I found my XCode IDE overwritten with the new XCode version IDE which supported the iPhone development. I even downloaded podcasts with the Apple Evangelists giving excellent tips and tricks on iPhone based development. As I have only done development for the desktop, it was necessary to understand that it was not the same thing. Development in a phone which has memory and power constraints in tricky. The consistency and accuracy to be followed is extremely important.
I also came to know that the development language for independent apps in the iPhone was Objective C, a ANSI C based superset. The constructs are different and sometimes confusing. I like the part where messages are passed for method calls, it reminded me of Ruby. I am still trying to get in grips with this language for further development.
I was mesmerized by the development platform that Apple provided. XCode for app development, DashCode for web based development, Instruments for performance analysis. The iPhone development does not has the Interface Builder support yet but once it comes there no beating the toolkit.
Looking forward to some excellent programming on Objective C now !!!
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