iPhone development update

I've been a little busy the last week learning and experimenting with the iPhone SDK and made some good progress. There's a lot to learn though, and I have to learn different aspects of the system at the same time, a new OS, a new IDE, a new language, new OSX libraries, and then the actual iPhone SDK. Trying to figure out all of these things at the same time makes it a little confusing, and makes the learning curve steeper.

As far as OSX, I've managed to figure out the basics and I can pretty much do what I need to do without a big hassle. But when it comes to Xcode (Apple's IDE), it's a whole different story. There's a lot of basic features missing from it, and I find myself having to do things manually, things that I'm used to having done automatically without effort in Eclipse like build-as-you-type and auto-format. It's not very customizable either, so I'm stuck having things done and look Apple's way.

Learning the OSX and iPhone libraries and APIs is just like learning any other platform, you start with the basics and you add and build on it. There's a lot of trial and error. Having a simulator allows you to do small changes and test immediately for a fast testing cycle.

Yesterday I decided to finally dish out the 99$ to be registered in the iPhone developer program, which allows you to test on an actual iPhone, and some other small things, and eventually publish your app to the AppStore. After I registered, there was a whole process I had to do to basically tie my account/Mac/iPhone/App all together and it was a little bit more complicated than it should have been. There was a lot of certification and signing involved. But it's finally done. and now I can test on my phone.

At this point I had a functioning game that I was excited to get on the phone and test. Unfortunately, and to my surprise, there was a huge performance difference. Obviously, I expected a performance difference between the simulator and the iPhone, but this was a big hit, and the game was practically unplayable and very choppy, which was a big disappointment. Now I have to go back and try to improve that or find another way of doing things faster. I might also try to work on basic iPhone UI apps which is easier to develop than a manually-rendered-graphics game until I get my basic knowledge up.

Exciting times ahead.