iPhone App Development, Finally
So I just started building apps for the iPhone. This may come as a surprise to many, since I probably should have been building them from day one. But I was wary of the business side of things: complete control of the app store by Apple and the process of app approval. And I won’t deny that XCode and Objective-C were barriers as well. A quick look last year told me that they were a far cry from AS3, PHP and Lingo, the languages I’m best at.
But I got over it all and plowed into Objective-C a few weeks ago. It was slow at first as the book I was using put a heavy emphasis on controls and switches. After struggling with it, I realized that these were just like components in Flash, and I don’t use components. So I looked elsewhere.
I found a whole world of iPhone game developers using Cocos2d for iPhone to make games, and skipping all the NIB/XIB file stuff. After I gave in and decided it was OK to use a framework, things went a lot smoother. I was able to make things happen and got my first game all ready to go.
I worked out a lot of different things this first time around, like building menus, animating sprites, timers, etc. So the next game should go even faster.
Now I’m in that limbo of iPhone app approval. I submitted last Wednesday night, the 20th. So this is day number 8. I’m trying not to work on any more iPhone stuff until I see my first game in the store. I really want to get an idea of what it is like to have a game out there. Not only how much revenue comes in, but how much customer support is involved.