iPhone SDK weekend update
Apple could really do a lot more to make this easier.
My appreciation for PHP is growing. Not the language, but the development community and references. PHP.net is really good. Nearly every function has a usage example and user comments. I guess I took that for granted.
Also, PHP isn’t updated randomly every few weeks in ways that break old functionality with no schedule or roadmap.
Apple’s secrecy is great for product launches, but it’s painful to try to develop against it. And while developing for the iPhone SDK, you feel like you’re the only person in the world doing it. There’s no community. No examples. No websites. No tutorials. It took all night before I even found the beta-3 changelog (after they helpfully removed a critical rendering function of UITableView and broke my code).
It’s a good thing this is an attractive platform for other reasons.
Because of the pain required to make them and the ease of charging money in this environment, I don’t expect any high-quality iPhone applications to be free.
But that’s probably a good thing:
- For developers: It’s a massive new market of people willing to pay for software. Good free alternatives are unlikely to arrive and erode the paid products’ marketshare.
- For users: A healthy paying market will encourage good developers to write good software for the platform.