An iPhone Rant Follow-up

One of the reasons I wrote the iPhone rant three weeks ago is that I wanted to lay out my initial reactions to the iPhone SDK, XCode and developing for Apple products in general.

It has now been three weeks since I made that post, and in the meantime I have finished 5 iPhone apps — one of which is in the app store, 3 that are in the pipe, and one which will be submitted shortly.  I also have 3 more in development.

Let’s start there: in three weeks, I’ve built 5 apps.  Fast development is something I’ve always loved about  developing for mobile platforms.  This is especially true when developing games.  While there are developers out there building complicated game engines for the iPhone, I see a huge opportunity for small, simple, one-man projects that can be conceived, developed and shipped in a matter of days.

The app store seems to agree with me.  The top games for the iPhone over the past couple months have been simple modern-day updates to retro game concepts (example: iShoot) or casual/puzzle games (example: Blocked).

That’s all wonderful, but not necessarily unique to the iPhone.  What is unique to the iPhone is the huge market they’ve created — a market of people willing to spend a buck on a temporary diversion.

So what about XCode?  I’ve started to become accustomed to working with XCode, but I have to say the little annoyances have become big ones.  Again, I think I’ve become spoiled by well thought-out IDEs like Visual Studio and even Eclipse.

So in short, I’m getting used to it.  Stay tuned for blog posts announcing my iPhone projects, as soon as I figure out how to link to iTunes.