Raven Zachary on the Inside iPhone O’Reilly Blog writes:
I love talking with entrepreneurs and people passionate about their ideas. It’s one of the things I look forward to most in my week. Unfortunately, we are at a phase in the growth of the iPhone ecosystem where there is a significant gap between individuals with the ideas and those who are actually capable of turning the ideas into iPhone applications. This gap is almost entirely financial in nature. The demand for iPhone developers exceeds the supply and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
This is a good thing. We have a situation where it is realised that while ideas do have merit, they are worthless without execution and unless you have the ability to execute it, or the money to have that execution funded, then your idea has only merit going for it.
This is why I think xCake, though not fully formed, has some amazing potential as a way to increase the iPhone development skills in the province. The problem being that I don’t know anyone locally who has the expertise and the time to do justice to it. Stuart Gibson and I are meeting weekly and setting homeworks to improve our iPhone/Cocoa development knowledge but it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight.
How long does it take to become a Mac/iPhone developer? I’ve seen a lot of iPhone developers out there who have ten years of developing on the Mac and some with more (based on being developers for Mac OS 9 and/or OpenSTEP). It takes time.
Do you need a Mac to develop for the IPhone?
Can we not use a win machine?
a) why would you?
b) there is one crazy bugger who does, but again, why would you?
I am a .Net developer and I use a PC etc. I am interested in learning to develop for I devices but this learning seem to be expensive: I was told the development can be done only on Macs. So, this is why there is a shortage of developers for iPhone.
I would not spend 1000+ to get a machine just for that.
Your mileage may vary. I’ve never seen a user interface on Windows machines that makes me WANT to use a machine – even though some software is only available for Windows – e.g. mscape.
Bad UI is no excuse. Maybe they’ll do better in Windows 7.
The reason there’s a shortage of developers is that you’ve got a device that sold 6 million in a year and then sold another 10 million in the next 6 months…and it uses the same language and basic frameworks as the Mac – which only had a small number of developers.
If you don’t want to develop for it because the development machine costs $1000, then you must not reckon your apps would make you a profit 🙂 That’s fair enough. Pangea have had over a million downloads of their games – which start at $5.99 (excluding sales). That’s not bad and certainly worth a couple of thousand dollars for the development machine.