develop apps for the iPhone NOW NOW NOW
If you haven’t started developing applications for the iPhone and porting your existing apps, you should. As we know, bandwidth gets cheaper and CPUs get more powerful every year, and if you aren’t targeting mobile, you’re targeting the death of your business.
(Did that wake you up? Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating the threat, but I thought that fear mongering was the new leadership. Just kidding.)
Anyway, while I’m still busy finishing off iPhone Hacks for O’Reilly, Jonathan Z. has already published and practically sold out the first real book on iPhone development.
The good thing about his book is that you can develop apps on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, and that it turns out applications port over to the ‘official’ Apple SDK without significant effort. So the winning strategy seems to be: Develop an app with the current open toolchain, test it on your own Phone with the open tools, simulate it with Apple’s tools, and ship after June when Apple finally lets more people into the club to sell their apps.
And if you don’t want to give Apple 30% of your earnings, realize that according to some reports, over 2 Million people have jailbroken their phones - and thus have Installer.app on their phone. You can already target these phones with your shareware application - today - and make applications that rival Apple’s because they can access ALL the iPhone SDKs, more than the the “SDK Lite” that Apple offers.
So get started now!
-damien
Just one question: Is it legal to develop commercial software (e.g. Shareware) using the Toolchain? - The Toolchain does require headers from the original Apple Mac SDK and libs from the iPhone file system.