I’ve recently finished the functionality of my first native iPhone application. Here are some thoughts:
- Apple makes it easy to “do the right thing” as far as the UIKit libraries go, pretty nice, and cleaner & easier than Swing or .NET in many ways. Very humanistic.
- Unless I’m missing something, common tasks like field validation don’t seem to be built-in, that’s a hassle…
- No SOAP libraries yet either.
- Interface Builder isn’t quite there yet – many components still missing, so unless you’re doing a pretty simple UI, better code it by hand (which isn’t really that bad…)
- I’m not a huge fan of XCode – the code completion is very weak compared to eclipse, as is the display of errors/warnings – many more clicks/research needed to diagnose what’s going on.
- Managing your own memory sucks…
- Since I’m coding the UI by hand, lining things up pixel perfect is quite a hassle. I’d be nice if they had the concept of a layout manager, like Swing/AWT, laying out components in a grid is not intuative (many examples I’ve seen use UITableView and a whole mess of ugly switch statements – very inconvenient & hard to maintain.)
Read on for more about the app…