I have been asked to develop a relatively simple iPhone application. However, it would be my first application.
I am a fairly competent programmer and can turn my skills to a new language fairly quickly... what my question is, is...
How long has it taken some of you guys to make your first iPhone application and what was your experience like? Also, if you can say this sort of information, how much did you charge for it?!
Thanks in advance. Kindest Regards Tom
In my experience, this is the best place to learn iPhone development, hands-down:
http://mycodeteacher.com/lpackage.php?key=objc_iphone
Hard to say on time, but if you really devote yourself to these lessons, you should be able to create a simple app within a few weeks, I would think.
My first application took 3 months. My background was mostly C/C++. I had also done Java in college and Ruby in my free time. It was a app that gets images from a server, lets the user swipe through them, email them out, vote on them, and save favorites to the device. Those 3 months include several weeks to write the server. I did it as a paid intern and I would say the the total cost to my employer was 5k. Good Luck
Hi my name s Justin and I am 17. My only experience was writing essays in english and I started making an app early December, and I plan to be done here in like 2 weeks. I used the Stanford iTunes U movies in iTunes.
Edit
Meaning it is very easy to learn the language and my drawing app took me about 2 months. And don't think it is a very simple drawing app it is pretty complex.
If you have an OO language under your belt and have a mac, these are reasonable minimums for the creation of your first, simple application (based on my own experience):
So a total of 8 weeks, or two months, minimum, if you keep the app simple.
iPhone / Apple specific pitfalls that will delay you (i.e. other than things that would delay any app developer, such as feature creep):
Learning resources that I found helpful:
My first app took longer than this, about three months start to finish. I was a little more delayed because I registered as a corporation, spent about a week making small, unrelated "test" apps, and ran a longer beta test. My app had a total of 7 screens, 3 of which required some moderately complex UI logic. In addition it required writing scripts to convert a large data set w/ images, and copy editing a lot of bilingual text. You can check out a video of my first app that took about three months to create from the time I started learning Objective C to it's first day of sales on the App store. If your app is less complex than this, then it will almost certainly take you less time to launch it.
Check out the Stanford iPhone Application Development course:
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/itunes.stanford.edu.2024353965
I've only watched the first lecture but Alan Cannistraro is a great lecturer, and if the syllabus can be believed, you will be able to learn to do a complete iPhone app in just a few weeks.
I think PrairieDogg's answer is about all you need and 8 weeks is a good estimate. But the best advice I can give is this: don't insist on doing things the way you think they ought to be done based on experience you have gained on other platforms. This means read the HIG of course because you can get an app rejected for misusing UI elements. But often you will have an idea about how to do something programmatically in an iPhone app and you find yourself subclassing and writing heaps of code and doing tricky things to bend the system to your will. If anything takes more than about ten lines of code, that is your warning sign - start googling, there is probably an easy idiomatic way to do it. Sometimes it really does take that much code but on the whole it is an incredibly easy platform once you know how.
And make sure you are working in 10.6, the static analysis tool could save you a week all by itself.
I will add yet another vote for the Stanford iPhone Development course but with the caveat that the course instructors use a lot of Apple and Objective-C terminology without being able to easily translate those terms into language more familiar to the CS students in the class. It's obvious sometimes that they just don't know the general OO analogy to what Objective-C does in particular cases.
In my case, I finished a preliminary version of my first real app in about 3 months, which included watching the entire iTunes U course and following a bunch of the programming guides in the iPhone Dev Center. But, I will add that since then I've spent an additional 5 months completely re-engineering my application after discovering that most of what I was doing "my way" had a very robust Cocoa library available it that, if I learned how to use it properly, would greatly improve my app.
So long story short, the iPhone SDK and all its component libraries are very deep, and many of the design fundamentals they use take some getting used to. If you want to do anything complex, expect research, tutorial, and debugging time for each new Apple library you use.