0 Why the iPhone?
June 15th, 2009
When I say I make iPhone application, I’m often asked : “Why the iPhone?”. And usually, the person asking the question expects a “To make big money!” answer. While I hope to make good money from it, this is not the main reason, not even in my top 3:
- The iPhone is an amazing device
Everyday I’m stunned by what can be done with it. I’d never thought we could do so much with such a small device in 2009! It’s a very exiting platform to work on. 2 days ago I was on the highway going to Ottawa, testing an app I made that gets the latitude and longitude with the GPS, sends them to a website that answers with the country code and state, all done in less than 5 seconds! How amazing is that? - The SDK is one of the best ever made
Apple provides awesome development tools. Interface Builder is really cool to use for building the GUI. You can test and run your application on your computer through the iPhone Simulator (it can’t handle the GPS and camera features though). The Performance Tools are extremely powerful and help a lot debugging apps. This all makes iPhone development fun. - It’s all about simple and efficient apps
When making an iPhone application, you have to make it easy to use. Because consumers use their iPhone mostly while moving, they don’t have time to read lots of text, they don’t want to navigate through lots of different screens, it’s hard to tap on small buttons… So you need to make simple and efficient design. And that’s what I love!
Obviously I wouldn’t work full-time making iPhone apps if I knew I wouldn’t make money, and I expect to make a living out of it. But in my career I’ve almost always chosen a job I love over a paying one. Because when you do something you love, it doesn’t feel like work.
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