Phone apps written in Obj-C and C can use significant less battery life and memory than things built with the current generation of drag-and-drop visual app builder tools, or with flash.
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iOS How hard to make an iPhone app ?
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DipDog3
macrumors 65816
I also have a Java background, and the syntax of Obj-C takes a lot of getting used to!
Could somebody compare this to learning PHP. When I tried to learn that awhile back I got the concept. In fact I get the concept of programming in general. It is just a matter of learning what does what.
I am just wondering if this would be for somebody who is new but has a little bit more of an idea.
I am just wondering if this would be for somebody who is new but has a little bit more of an idea.
davedelong
macrumors member
If you're used to object-oriented programming using PHP, then it could help. However, PHP, as a general rule, is a function-driven language, not an object-driven one. Objects weren't added to PHP until four years ago, with the release of PHP 5.
That being said, knowing *any* programming language, whether it's an internet scripting language like PHP or an application development language like C or even Visual Basic can be a great boon to anyone wanting to learn ObjC/Cocoa. You'll understand the basic idea of deconstructing complex algorithms into a series or workflow of steps that a language requires to use.
I learned PHP long before I learned ObjC/Cocoa, and it did help. Not so much in the way of grokking the frameworks, but understanding concepts and knowing *how* to program.
Chalk this one up to Apple marketing !!
When the iPhone SDK was announced and demoed, Apple had developers come on stage and say, "Hey, it took us just a few weeks to get this app running and I hadn't done any Mac programming before". The image of the guy demoing Spore (or Monkey Ball) is so compelling. "Hey we did it in just three weeks!!"
Yup, I swallowed it too but its so ridiculously fake. Did they do the artwork and graphics modeling in three weeks? Did they do the audio soundtrack in three weeks? Did they come up with the concept and fine tune it in three weeks? Did they write the AI for the game in three weeks? Duhh, no! And when they say "we", do they mean the two geeky guys on stage? No, they conveniently ignore the fact that they had the support of a full team working on various aspects of the app, either specifically for the iphone or previously for other platforms. And they probably had expert Mac/Apple developers to guide them through the process of developing the iPhone port.
It makes for excellent marketing but its fake, fake, fake !
On the flip side, the reality is that Apple provides great development tools and they provide them for free. The iPhone SDK is powerful and well designed. The monetary cost of entry for a wannabe individual developer is low. And thats more than what you would get for other platforms - which can cost thousands of dollars and still provide crappier tools! (check out what it takes to create apps for the wii, psp, ps3, brew, palm or blackberry)
But as with writing any good application, it takes phenomenal time and effort to develop and fine tune the concept, put together different aspects of the app, write the code, test it, revise it and then maintain it over a period of time. If you have done any Mac OS X programming before, its easier to make the jump, otherwise you have additional platform specific hurdles to cross (Objective-C, Cocoa, Xcode tools, the various frameworks). Its feasible to come up with a trivial app but ITS NOT EASY to come up with anything more complicated. My hats off to those individual developers who have really good apps out there.
Chalk this one up to Apple's strategy and marketing prowess. Apple obviously wanted to make the "iPhone platform" successful and what better way to do it then make it look ridiculously easy and line up hordes of wannabe developers? It costs Apple nothing. In fact, they make money on it upfront, even before a single copy of an app is downloaded. Forget the $99 enrollment fee, its chump change for Apple. First, you gotta have a Mac to develop for the iPhone. Cha ching! And you also have to get an iPhone and a two year contract of which Apple supposedly gets a 20% cut! Cha Ching! And they get a 30% cut off all sales. More Cha Ching. And the more people who develop for the iPhone, the more potential developers they will have for the Mac in the future because the tools are so similar.
They have all the upside and very little downside. Brilliant! Balmer and Blackberry must be sh***ing in their pants.
---
So, having said the above, let me go off on a tangent and make a couple of predictions. ( Yes, I like to put my foot in my mouth. )
1) The App store will have thousands of apps, but the filtering process to separate the men from the boys will start once the iPhone SDK goes through a few revisions and it becomes harder to develop and maintain an app over time. Some will be successful, others will fall by the way side. A lot depends on how the SDK evolves and the competitive pressures it will face from other platforms.
2) Expect the iPhone SDK to get closer to the Mac OS SDK, perhaps even merge at some point. Its hard to imagine that Apple will Not come up with other touch devices such as a touch tablet that needs features from both Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. I can't imagine Apple keeping the two separate for a long time (many years), at least not internally. They may still get marketed as two separate SDKs.
When the iPhone SDK was announced and demoed, Apple had developers come on stage and say, "Hey, it took us just a few weeks to get this app running and I hadn't done any Mac programming before". The image of the guy demoing Spore (or Monkey Ball) is so compelling. "Hey we did it in just three weeks!!"
Yup, I swallowed it too but its so ridiculously fake. Did they do the artwork and graphics modeling in three weeks? Did they do the audio soundtrack in three weeks? Did they come up with the concept and fine tune it in three weeks? Did they write the AI for the game in three weeks? Duhh, no! And when they say "we", do they mean the two geeky guys on stage? No, they conveniently ignore the fact that they had the support of a full team working on various aspects of the app, either specifically for the iphone or previously for other platforms. And they probably had expert Mac/Apple developers to guide them through the process of developing the iPhone port.
It makes for excellent marketing but its fake, fake, fake !
On the flip side, the reality is that Apple provides great development tools and they provide them for free. The iPhone SDK is powerful and well designed. The monetary cost of entry for a wannabe individual developer is low. And thats more than what you would get for other platforms - which can cost thousands of dollars and still provide crappier tools! (check out what it takes to create apps for the wii, psp, ps3, brew, palm or blackberry)
But as with writing any good application, it takes phenomenal time and effort to develop and fine tune the concept, put together different aspects of the app, write the code, test it, revise it and then maintain it over a period of time. If you have done any Mac OS X programming before, its easier to make the jump, otherwise you have additional platform specific hurdles to cross (Objective-C, Cocoa, Xcode tools, the various frameworks). Its feasible to come up with a trivial app but ITS NOT EASY to come up with anything more complicated. My hats off to those individual developers who have really good apps out there.
Chalk this one up to Apple's strategy and marketing prowess. Apple obviously wanted to make the "iPhone platform" successful and what better way to do it then make it look ridiculously easy and line up hordes of wannabe developers? It costs Apple nothing. In fact, they make money on it upfront, even before a single copy of an app is downloaded. Forget the $99 enrollment fee, its chump change for Apple. First, you gotta have a Mac to develop for the iPhone. Cha ching! And you also have to get an iPhone and a two year contract of which Apple supposedly gets a 20% cut! Cha Ching! And they get a 30% cut off all sales. More Cha Ching. And the more people who develop for the iPhone, the more potential developers they will have for the Mac in the future because the tools are so similar.
They have all the upside and very little downside. Brilliant! Balmer and Blackberry must be sh***ing in their pants.
---
So, having said the above, let me go off on a tangent and make a couple of predictions. ( Yes, I like to put my foot in my mouth. )
1) The App store will have thousands of apps, but the filtering process to separate the men from the boys will start once the iPhone SDK goes through a few revisions and it becomes harder to develop and maintain an app over time. Some will be successful, others will fall by the way side. A lot depends on how the SDK evolves and the competitive pressures it will face from other platforms.
2) Expect the iPhone SDK to get closer to the Mac OS SDK, perhaps even merge at some point. Its hard to imagine that Apple will Not come up with other touch devices such as a touch tablet that needs features from both Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. I can't imagine Apple keeping the two separate for a long time (many years), at least not internally. They may still get marketed as two separate SDKs.
1. I don't think the SDK is going to change so substantially that it would start to scare people away any more than it is now. I think (and hope) that the thing that is going to scare away "the boys" is that they realize that not every piece of junk app is going to be profitable and worth their time to develop. Right now people are still hearing about all of these great sales numbers and trying to jump on the money boat without realizing that the initial wave of people buying anything and everything is already starting to pass.
2. I think you're pretty much right on here. I mean, the two SDKs are already very, very similar, for the most part just the UI classes are different and most of the more heavyweight frameworks are not included in the iPhone SDK.
I assume that Apple will very much want to keep the SDK stable but we know how that works with any system over a large piece of time. The basic frameworks will remain similar but larger system wide features can change thus impacting existing applications that don't know how to deal with the changes.
Consider, for instance, what would happen if Apple had to implement a revised bluetooth framework, the push notification service, cut-n-paste, background processes (i think they will happen, sometime, when its convenient for Apple and AT&T) and you had old applications that didn't know how to deal with events triggered by these changes.
Also, if Cocoa and Cocoa Touch get merged/aligned/combined, and it seems it will happen with Snow Leopard, it could have runtime impacts on the current SDK and apps.
Regarding your other point about people scared away from writing "junk apps", I share the hope, but it may be a while - many months. People haven't seen any financial reports yet and the success stories will likely get very hyped up in the press and on the net, drawing more wannabe developers to the fold.
Apple may also have to come up some automatic quality control mechanisms for the apps out there otherwise the store will get run over with free and 99c crap. Its hard for someone today to get a feel for an app unless its free or offers a lite version, which can be deceiving. If people have a bad experience downloading stuff from the app store, they are going to be wary of buying stuff and it will hurt the good developers as well as Apple.
davedelong
macrumors member
No, I don't think the SDKs will be merged any time soon. In order for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch to merge, that requires an entirely different breed of device. That's why they didn't just port Cocoa in the first place; the fundamental paradigms between a mouse with point-and-click and an iPhone with swipe and pinch are VERY different. The day Cocoa merges with Cocoa Touch will be the day that computers no longer ship with mice because they're all touch based. That won't be for a LONG time.
That's why we keep sites like www.perversiontracker.com around 😀
You don't have to wait until _all_ computers are touch based, only till the first Mac is touch based. There are rumors that Apple will reveal a touch based tablet soon but I think its more likely to happen in conjunction with Snow Leopard. The two prerequisites for a tablet are unified mouse/touch support (okay, thats desirable but not strictly necessary, see below) and built in hand writing recognition, neither of which are fully there in Leopard. And these are big enough features that Apple may be loath to destabilize Leopard by adding them suddenly in a new seed.
But who knows, its certainly feasible today. Depends on how desperately The Jobs wants a touch tablet given that touch tablets are beginning to get quite popular in the enterprise. Multi-touch is already in Leopard to support the MacBook Air and upcoming laptops. It wouldn't be that hard to scale its use to the whole screen. So in some sense regular Cocoa already has touch features, just not integrated with mouse input. Not elegant, but it works.
There are obviously other optimization in Cocoa Touch and it does not include many of the heavy weight Cocoa frameworks, but in a few years its not hard to imagine the distinction being one of marketing and not code. If I were Apple, I really wouldn't want to maintain two separate code branches that will increasingly diverge over time but still need to stay in sync.
Yup, nice one 🙂
We got financial reports 2 weeks ago, and it was hyped up in the press and on the net.
My bad, I should have been more precise in my statement.
Yes, the first set of reports are out and a few people have openly discussed them. The focus has naturally been on some of the very successful applications that managed to grab the early interest. People have been drooling and trying to extrapolate this public data to the larger "opportunity". Yes, the opportunity is certainly there but its not clear at this time how things will progress. We have very few data points. A few more months of data and we will have some meaningful trends, not yet.
I am sure Apple will do their part to make sure that the interest in the store and app development remains high.
Less Talk More Walk
Sbrocket,
You sound like you have 20 years of experience programming. However, I just looked at your crappy app EQUIVALANCE.. LOL! What did it take you like 10mins to make this app?? You talk this much on this forum/topic and your web page can't even load up properly, let alone your friggin' app..
Your webpage's iPhone looks like it's longer than my cordless home phone LMAO!
You can talk the talk but can't walk the walk.. Don't try to sound like a programming genius when your own programming skills suck b@lls.. 😀
Sbrocket,
You sound like you have 20 years of experience programming. However, I just looked at your crappy app EQUIVALANCE.. LOL! What did it take you like 10mins to make this app?? You talk this much on this forum/topic and your web page can't even load up properly, let alone your friggin' app..
Your webpage's iPhone looks like it's longer than my cordless home phone LMAO!
You can talk the talk but can't walk the walk.. Don't try to sound like a programming genius when your own programming skills suck b@lls.. 😀
The Iphone is a joke. after android grows bigger it will definitely have a native flash player (probably more likely something like the AIR player). The flash applications will make a mockery of the trash objective-c applications.
why would u ever want to learn objective-c? it seems so useless since it only works on Apple stuff. I never even heard of objective-c until my boss made me learn it.
I would suggest to anyone wanting to learn objective-c to rethink the idea and not do it.
And if anyone really wants to be a programmer go to the university library and read 20 books on programming.
by the time you learn how to code in objective-c, iphones will be selling for $10 on craigslist, and the only apps that will be selling on them at all will be the few rare ones produced by companies made by teams of developers with 20 yr veterens/masters/doctor graduates.
robbieduncan
Moderator emeritus
When it's possible to get the flash runtime and an app running in 1Mb or RAM (I have iPhone apps under this) then we can talk. Until then I'm happy with a real, C based, well structured, high-performance language.
Oh, and it's not like you're getting your beloved, memory hogging, laggy, low performance flash on Android anyway: it's Java or nothing for them.
Anyways to the guy who started this thread if you still read all this.
you probably don't even know what RAM is, so don't even bother trying to make an application.
you will NEVER be able to get a finished product on the app store.
even if you know what RAM is, I would give u a 0.001% chance of getting a finished product on the app story.
you probably don't even know what RAM is, so don't even bother trying to make an application.
you will NEVER be able to get a finished product on the app store.
even if you know what RAM is, I would give u a 0.001% chance of getting a finished product on the app story.
When did this forum fill up with trolls?
Objective-C isn't easy, but it's not rocket science either. The syntax is odd if you aren't used to it but that's about it.
My day job is writing web apps using Ruby. I picked up the Hillegaas Cocoa book about 6 weeks ago and started learning the iPhone SDK about a month ago. I'm now close to beta testing my first iPhone app.
If you're struggling to learn it then I would suggest you reevaluate your own technical skills. Christ, if you think Objective-C is weird, try learning Smalltalk or Lisp. 🙄
To the OP - please take no notice of what I can only assume is yet another bitter Java programmer (going by the username) starting to realize their J2EE gravy train is leaving the station...
I'd suggest anyone wanting to listen to springframework rethink the idea and not do it.
Sbrocket
macrumors 65816
krino1 -
I'll just assume that you have some self-esteem issues and ignore the bitterness. You are right that I don't have 20 years of experience - much less, as I'm an undergrad - but I'm not sure what that has to do with anything I said. Writing software is not a walk in the park if you don't want to put in the time for it, which is pretty much all I said in my first post here.
That said, I doubt you could grasp what went into Equivalence since you don't seem to be able to grasp at least what it does (probably because you aren't part of the target audience, which is fine). I'm not exactly sure what you're going for here besides an ignorant bashing fest, but I think that my satisfied users (at least) would disagree with you. Oh, and Apple PR: http://is.gd/2qOq.
Code:
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* ___ c_c_c_C/ \C_c_c_c____________I have basic HTML/PHP knowledge but no C or anything. I was wondering how hard it would be to produce a simple reference app, one that open with a list of selections and when you quick on one it takes you to a page with some information on it.
At a stretch I'd like to let the app list the selections according to values within their info.
Could I stitch this together with sample codes?
At a stretch I'd like to let the app list the selections according to values within their info.
Could I stitch this together with sample codes?
Sorry for bringing up a reallly old thread guys..But I am just thinking of recruiting a few programmers who can be trained to code iPhone apps.
To start with, can someone explain the basic skill-sets that we need to get started with app coding?
I think of photoshop designing, PHP & C coding..Is it right? What are the languages one needs to be proficient in?
Thanks a lot..
To start with, can someone explain the basic skill-sets that we need to get started with app coding?
I think of photoshop designing, PHP & C coding..Is it right? What are the languages one needs to be proficient in?
Thanks a lot..
iphone app creation
well i think it really depends on how "difficult" or "complex" you'd want to have the apps that you're creating. And for what purpose? 🙂
if you're looking to do a truly customized app creation, yes you will need to know all of those, plus dreamweaver, and a few other programs. also be proficient in getting the iphone simulator to work correctly.
depending on what level you'd look for. for example, on the high end of customized apps, like mutual mobile, they highly customize it,, but it costs an arm and a leg to get their programmers to work on something. there's also others such as appiction which are medium priced, but not sure how many they've done. as well as business apps, such as mobi interactive that does it much cheaper, but not as customizable.
but probably to start off, you'd definitely want to go to apple and open a developers account.
hope that helps!
well i think it really depends on how "difficult" or "complex" you'd want to have the apps that you're creating. And for what purpose? 🙂
if you're looking to do a truly customized app creation, yes you will need to know all of those, plus dreamweaver, and a few other programs. also be proficient in getting the iphone simulator to work correctly.
depending on what level you'd look for. for example, on the high end of customized apps, like mutual mobile, they highly customize it,, but it costs an arm and a leg to get their programmers to work on something. there's also others such as appiction which are medium priced, but not sure how many they've done. as well as business apps, such as mobi interactive that does it much cheaper, but not as customizable.
but probably to start off, you'd definitely want to go to apple and open a developers account.
hope that helps!
There is no such thing as programming without coding. Your experience with a WYSIWYG webpage designer will not translate to any type of development including iPhone or Visual Studio. I suggest that you go buy a basic book on how to program before tackling anything beyond HTML.
I'm a experienced Java and C# programmer and I think ObjectiveC is a stupid programming language.
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