Summa

In our first post about whether or not an organization should consider building an iPhone application, we were walking through a series of questions:

•    Why is my application a fit?
•    Why now?
•    How hard is it?
•    What should I worry about?
•    How do I get started?

Let’s pick up with “How hard is it”?  If you want to reread about the first 2 questions - just jump back to the first part in the series.

How hard is it?

Well - let’s define “hard”. How many organizations have Macs in their environment? How many people have Objective C programmers? How many people have iPhones/iPods touch for development? Sure - most of these are resource / skill set issues and those can be overcome, but the fact is that the introduction of Macs into an IT environment is either very welcomed or you’re the one with two heads for suggesting it. It comes down to the culture of the organization and how they deal with change to understand what kind of an impact this will have. Objective C programmers are kinda hard to come by. You can definitely get some Java/C# people to learn it but some of your best bets might actually be your C++ veterans from the past. Once you have the building blocks (machines, skill set, etc. ) working with the actual iPhone SDK and development environment is a joy. Sure - it isn’t the most robust IDE you will come across and it does have its nuances, but you will come to like it. The SDK is very well organized and designed, where once you come to understand how the various classes / interfaces come together, you can almost start to anticipate how new classes will work. Documentation for the SDK is very good. Learning to work with Interface Builder, Instruments, iPhone Simulator and the Debugger take a little bit of time - but you will be able to use all of these tools in a short period of time.

From the enterprise integration side - it has never been easier. As companies have begun to organize their functional offerings in web services, it makes developing a new application all that much easier. Plus - we have all have been designing to the MVC architecture for quite a long time now - it is finally time to test the architecture out with a new view. You can think of the iPhone application as a new view on top of a MVC stack or you can think of it as a consumer of web services. Either way - there are multiple mechanism for your iPhone application to communicate with your enterprise systems.

What should I worry about?

It has been a while since we have had to worry about memory management and memory leaks. The world has a whole generation of programmers out there that have never had to battle through memory going away at odd times and memory sticking around longer than it should. On a mobile, limited resource device, this matters. However, all bright developers can pick this up and will eventually become second hand at memory management - however there is a learning curve, and your initial application iterations will be much buggier than your later ones. To a lesser extent, people haven’t had to worry about performance as much as they will on the mobile device. We are used to working on PCs or Servers with lots of memory and tremendously powerful CPUs with all of the electricity we could possibly use. It is a little different on a mobile device. Suddenly, you don’t have quite the horsepower you have had in the past - so use it wiser. You don’t have as much battery power as electricity, so conserve it wisely.

How do I get started?

Quite frankly…dig in… Go to the Apple AppStore and look at the apps….try them out….see what you want your app to be/become. There are plenty of sites to download content and sample code for the iPhone SDK. Reach out to user groups and read up on as much as you can. And of course - if you need to ask a question or two to people who have been there / done that / got the t-shirt….reach out to us via the comments section of the blog or an email to Help me with iPhone Development!.

Conclusion

I sure hope you enjoyed reading about things to consider when contemplating producing an iPhone application or not.  We believe strongly that this aspect of software development will continue to flourish and is still very much at its infancy.  Now is the perfect time to develop an iPhone application to fit your needs and I hope you make the decision to do so.