I guess I’ve lagged on completing this blog entry series for long enough.

Indeed I was able to complete my application in the time frame I set out for. The application itself worked pretty well. I know I could have made it a lot better if I were actually able to get the application onto my iPhone during the development phase or have the simulator use the iTunes library as the basis for its library. I am now debating whether or not I want to put the application up on Apple’s App Store.

My final conclusion regarding the iPhone SDK and Objective-C shouldn’t be surprising - yes the SDK made development simple. Other than the weird memory management of Objective-C, it too was also fairly easy to learn. But at the end of the day, a language is just a language. The SDK has to be fairly robust in order to attract developers as well as help with the interaction of the phone. I’d almost say it was a pleasure to develop for the iPhone, but I won’t. I won’t because due to Apple’s policies on how the app gets onto a phone (even if you want to use a development phone), made developing for it pretty rough. Development would have been much better if I didn’t have a media player aspect to my application, however it did and since the simulator cannot simulate playing media off an iPhone’s library and since there were a thousand hoops that needed to be jumped through in order to get the app on the phone itself, it just made everything much rougher than it should have been. One can argue that you really only have to jump through the hoops once, but even in this case, once is far too much. Allow applications to be easily put on your own iPhone, Apple. Why do I have to pay you $100/year for the privilege of getting applications that I write onto my own phone?

I’m so glad that it is easy to jailbreak iPhones. Any developer that wants to develop applications for personal use for the iPhone should just jailbreak their iPhone and upload it that way. Don’t pay Apple money for something as asinine as this.