Adding iPhone Apps to the Mix

The New York Times recently profiled a few developers who made it big selling iPhone apps, and while it’s becoming tough to compete in what is quickly become a saturated market, we are still in the very early days and there are still plenty of opportunities to be had in the world of iPhone and mobile development.

If you’re interested in learning more about developing applications for the iPhone, the opportunities are out there if you’re a talented developer with an entrepreneurial bent and some tolerance for the risk that comes with selling iPhone apps in a closed market environment.

For starters, you’ll want to visit the iPhone Dev Center and sign up for the iPhone Developer Program and see if you have the chops on the programming side. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to access the online resource materials such as videos introducing you to iPhone development, as well as documentation, sample code, and a wealth of articles. As you’ll quickly find out, iPhone apps are developed in Objective-C – a superset of C that uses syntax from both C and Smalltalk. Objective-C isn’t for the faint of heart but luckily there seems to be a fair bit of documentation out there such as Apple’s own Introduction to the Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language.

You’ll also want to be sure to check out the process for distributing an iPhone app and then also think of creative ways to market and promote your app – after all, you’re going to be competing with thousands of iPhone apps. In all this, you’ll also want to become very familiar with the concept of micropayments because, contrary to early predictions that micropyament would fail as a business model, micropayments have played an integral role in the revenue model of successful iPhone application businesses.

Favourite iPhone Apps?

For our part, we’re going to start reviewing some of our favourite apps right here in the Midstride blog. If you have any favourite iPhone Apps, we’d love to hear about them – drop us a comment below and let us know which you love, which you hate, which you wish you made, or better yet which iPhone app you wish someone out there would make!

Buncholinks from this Article:

Top 10 links for December Week 1 – 2008

Here is the first installment of our top 10 links for the week – a selection of ten links we see as being very useful and important to the web development/business crowd.  This list covers both technical articles for developers and higher level business ones.

1. 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks for WordPress – Smashingmagazine
   Great tips for any user of wordpress that relies on RSS for syndicating content.  Most of these tips show you how to gain more control over your RSS feeds.
2. 5 good programming habits in PHP
   General rules of thumbs for php programmers.   Some of the rules may make you think twice, like the rule of “Never copy and paste”.
3. What is More Important To Succeed Online:  Business or Technical Skills?
   A question for the ages, at least in the IT field, is it more important to be business or technical minded?  A very interesting article on how these skills have attributed to the success of several companies.
4. Firefox 3.1 beta news – web workers
   A CNET article on Firefox 3.1.  The interesting part is how “web workers” can process work in the background.  Background processing would push the RIA movement further and I’m sure would lead to some very novel ideas from early adopters.
5. How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server for free – with Ubuntu
   A practical and useful article on how to setup a web server.  This is a very well written article that shows how far Linux has come in terms of ease of use.
6. How to use Twitter as a tool
   An article by Guy Kawasaki on how to use Twitter for productivity.  It’s a very detailed post and for those new to Twitter, it explains the utility factor of Twitter beyond just being a gossip tool.
7. Online Advertising and Its Impact on Web Design
   An excellent article from Smashing Magazine on how online advertising affects web design.  It’s an interesting topic as web advertising is a primary means of revenue for the majority of blogs.
8. Top 10 Web Dev Blunders of 2008
   A list of some of the biggest “mistakes” we’ve seen on the web this year.
9. Who Protects The Internet?
   Who does protect the Internet?  This article should be of interest to anyone who uses the Internet, so that’s a lot of people.  Techcrunch takes a go at reviewing where we are with the Internet.
10. Referrer Detector WordPress Plugin
    A great wordpress tool to greet your users coming from specific sites.

I hope you find these articles useful.  You can contribute your own links by visiting this buncholink which groups related links together in a useful manner.