Summa

For many Java/C# developers, developing for a mobile device is a new experience. Of course - we have the fringe Windows Mobile and J2ME developers, but the vast majority have used Java/C# for web and application development only. In order to develop for a mobile device, you need to be able to run the software on the device, but is this the lone choice? Apple and the XCode development environment provide the iPhone Simulator, an application to run and debug iPhone software without using an actual device. While this is a fantastic productivity enhancement (reduces the time necessary to deploy the code to the device), you need to be careful with this ability.

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Today, I’ve had no meetings with management (a rarity). But I’ve been away from my desk virtually the entire day, running from cube to cube helping developers do their work.The chance to mentor other developers is one of my favorite things about being a consultant. Mentoring really goes hand-in-hand with being a consultant, especially a senior consultant. Consultants are often looked on to play this role (the mentor/coach) even if it’s not explicitly asked of them. Be sure to take every opportunity to help others when you can. Be proactive; offer your help wherever you can be useful. Helping other developers helps you as well.

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Welcome to the kickoff of Developing iPhone Applications, a series of blogs aimed at helping programmer, engineers, and architects coming from a Java/C# background to create rich, interactive applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Leveraging Summa’s experience and past projects, we are going to create blog entries on a variety of topics.

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Over the last few weeks, during downtimes between meetings and so on, I have spent several hours deleting unused and duplicated code. By the time I was done I’d killed around 500 lines of code (out of a 20,000 line project). So you shrank the codebase by a couple percent. So what? Why would I ever bother doing that?

Well I’ll tell you, deleting code provides a number of wonderful benefits — some purely mental, and some very practical.

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