And so the adventure begins...
Following a few days off (I'm at the start of a long break from work) I've decided to deep dive into iPhone/iTouch Objective-C development. Seeing how the product has taken the market by storm it's easy to get swept up in the hype and loose sight of the down sides; however from what I've seen, these small hand held devices are going to make it into the Corporate space much faster than anyone expects. Also with wireless technology improvements in speed, availability and even reasonable 3G tariffs, these devices will be used for accessing lots of corporate information.
OK, so why then did the Microsoft offering never make it? How can the iPhone break the hold that Blackberry has on Corporate? These are valid questions that probably need to be answered, but I'll leave that to the history books. From my point of view the iPhone has something that the Microsoft/Blackberry/Symbian offering never had and that's a new way to interact with the software... touch screens. Can the other devices catch up? Sure, but for now iPhone is riding a wave that does not seem to be ready to crash anytime soon.
To be honest starting this project has been on my mind for some time, being in the Microsoft space for about 20 years you'd think I'd stick to what I know, but I've always been a generalist at heart and knowing how something works helps me in many ways. Mostly I find it helps in the management of projects using these technologies. A little bit of knowledge is very powerful, I'm sure we've all sat down with a third party supplier or staff developer and been told "Oh, that's going to take a few weeks", when you know it's only going to really take a few hours. It's not that the developer is wrong, maybe they just don't know or don't understand your requirements. Bridging that gap in understanding is vital to setting customers expectations and (more importantly) setting and keeping to your deadlines.
So I start this work in earnest.. moving from the comfort of C#, Visual Studio and Windows 2003 to the new spaces of OSX is going to be a hard slog. In the following blogs I'll document my experiences, which I hope will assist other developers along the same road.
My plan is simple.. document how I got a simple application from the planning to production environment over the next few weeks. That with luck will involve setting up the environment, formulating the plan, reviewing online resources, getting the app past Apple QA and documenting lots and lots of error messages.
As I once said at the start of what turned out to be the worst project of my career "It's going to be great!".
