I’m wondering what kind of skills are required to build iPhone apps. I’ve been poking around apple’s developer site and it looks like you need to fork over at least $99 to get an account and have access to the developer forums. And the user forums aren’t technical enough to tell me anything worth while.
I manage a small software developer team at work and I’m toying with the idea of building an iPhone app to interface with some of the most popular software that my team has made.
I have three Remedy developers, a beginner Oracle DBA and a Java developer. Does this sound like a sufficient skill set to build iPhone apps? I’d like to start with an app that makes queries against Remedy’s Action Request System.
If I’m not mistaken, Apple support development in a an object-oriented language called Object C. I do not know it, but am given to believe it is not unlike C++.
Novell also have a C# development environment called MonoTouch.
First, my credentials: I’m one of the developers of an Apple-Design-Award-winning iPhone app, which was shown on stage at last year’s WWDC Keynote. And here’s what I can tell you about my experience:
You don’t need to pay anything to download the SDK and run apps in the Simulator. The Simulator is extremely handy, but it’s not the same as the real device. But you can get a feel for how things work, and it’s super handy for testing and debugging anything network-related. For $99, you can develop apps for the App Store, and you can also deploy apps to up to 100 devices without going thru the app store.
Objective C isn’t too tough to learn, if you know Java or C++. Once you get past the funky square bracket message-send syntax, it’s a very nice language that combines some very nice dynamic objective-oriented features with the low-level power of C. It took a day to pick up the basics of ObjC, and we built a working prototype within 3 weeks with a 2-man team, mostly in spare time.
I don’t know anything about Remedy, so I can’t help you there.
I’d be happy to answer any further questions that you have.
Impressive, thanks for the info. I will find out on Tuesday if anyone on my team has C++ experience. In the mean time, I guess I was just wondering about the feasibility. Since our Remedy system has a web interface, I guess there is no reason an iPhone app can’t be made to sit on top of that and do some basic db queries.
Oh, one thing I forgot to add. The UI libraries for iPhone are in Objective C, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use C++ as well, if you have existing C++ code you want to use. Not sure if that helps or not. Also, if you have XML-based web services, it’s very easy to interface with those.