iPhone SDK, this is it. March 7, 2008
Posted by vinnyt in : Apple, Computer Science Theory, FreeBSD, GPS, Mac, Mac Apps, Programming, iPhone , add a comment I have been developing applications for mobile devices going on about 6 years now. I started out developing applications for a major medical information company here in Kansas City by the name of Cerner. Our platform was PocketPC, and from a development stand point it was nice, not that bad, but just not that powerful. There where limitations on the device that we encountered and had to overcome on a near daily basis. In the end however we successfully created a suite of applications that is in use today and doing quite well. My role was in this case to build most of the low level foundations that where used by the other developers. This sounds simple but frankly speaking it isn’t I had to in most cases devise from scratch many things that in my mind should be facilitated by the OS, but in pocketPC at the time they where not there.
I next moved on to PalmOS. I worked for a company that was targeting the trucking industry. Palm OS was about as bare bones as one could imagine, but it allowed for those of us interested in computer science and why we optimize our code a unique opportunity to explore that side of our skill set. Translation, the devices where very underpowered and so everything had to run as efficiently as possible to ensure that the user experience was not compromised. The result was we abandoned the projects and platform because well the target audience didn’t see the use and it would not fit in their business and second the applications we created where so complex they would be unusable.
Having developed on both of these there is one major problem that both devices share: designing a usable UI is extremely difficult. The stylus interface is terrible, and the screen is not big enough to build anything that needs large amounts of data. Next, each OS is very limited. Most of the applications I wrote needed to be asynchronous and networked. This meant multiple threads of execution and network connectivity when it was present. Let me just say this worked some of the time, and usually, when you did one thing you got locked out of something else. The last application I wrote for the mobile platform was on a pocketPC phone I carried for work. I used .NET and actually in very few lines I produced an application that connected to a bluetooth GPS downloaded position data and when a network became present the data would be uploaded to a web service where it was rendered(http://vinnyt.org/location/v3/) this worked pretty well but I ran into the same headaches I hit before network didn’t work all that well and the multi-threading was poor.
I firmly believe that the iPhone will solve these problems and it is going to be the future of mobile computing. To start with the OS is Unix under the hood this is hands down the future of computing. It has been the past and I believe that in the years to come it will continue to advance and evolve. With it you get multi-threading that will scale, you get robust networking and a rich API set that will take care of most of the problems that we as mobile developers encounter. The iPhone UI is very intuitive and with a bit of forethought the UI constructs provided will lead to some very interesting and great applications. I believe that in the next few years we are going to see the market share of this device expand nearly exponentially… Mark my words.
