Should I consider any other tools outside the Apple development tools for iPad development?

Question

The Apple dev site makes it look as tho it has all the tools you want for developing iPad apps. Should I consider any other tools outside the Apple development tools for iPad development?

Thanks so much in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Adobe has some tools where you can author in Flash/Flex/Air and it will compile down into a valid iPhone/iPad application, that can be accepted and sold in the appstore.

There's also a company called Unity3D http://unity3d.com/unity/features/iphone-publishing.html that has some alternative iPhone/iPad development tools (where you program in C#!)

Answer 2

MonoTouch is another option, if you're a .NET developer looking to do iPhone/iPad development. (Currently MonoTouch has experimental, alpha-level support for iPad, but full support shouldn't be far away.) It's not free, but it's a great tool if you're coming from that background.

Plus it compiles to native code for the iPhone, so can be used for App Store builds and everything.

Answer 3

It depends on what kind of tools you're talking about... If you mean applications, you can use any editor you want for example, like TextMate or Vim or anything else (personally, I hate Xcode's built-in editor, it can't even open files in tabs...). You'll still need to use Xcode for building the app and IB for preparing the interfaces though (unless you want to create entire UI in code, which is madness). I'm not aware of any unofficial tools that can build an iPhone app or create NIB interface files.

If you mean frameworks that allow you to code in something else than ObjC (like Adobe's Flash tools or MonoTouch), then these were recently banned by Apple, so you need to stick to the standard ObjC/Cocoa APIs.