Well, I took the plunge. I needed a new PC anyway, so I went ahead and got the iMac. I've successfully set it up with a dual boot using boot camp. I can now boot up into either MAC OSX 10.5 (Leopard) or Windows Vista. One of the images I attached above actually shows me installing Vista Service Pack 1 onto the iMac.
I will save my iMac praise for another post. For right now, I thought I would talk a little bit about the iPhone SDK.
For developers working with Visual Studio, XCode (Apple's development IDE) falls a little short compared to what you are used to. In addition, there are some real setbacks when it comes to the state of the SDK. Here are some of the bigger ones:
- Garbage Collection: The iPhone SDk does not currently support garbage collection unlike the SDK for normal Mac OSX applications where it is an option. This is not too horrible, but it does require you to be VERY careful with memory allocation. Using the SDK reminded me more of developing in C++ than C#.
- UI Designer: This version of the toolkit does not provide a nice GUI for developing your screens like you see in Visual Studio. I understand that it is coming, but for now it is not present which means that these interfaces have to be created in code.
- IDE: The IDE is not nearly as polished as Visual Studio. Great features like dynamic help and displaying methods in classes as you type are not present. Again, it is not horrible but after using Microsoft's development products I am very spoiled. The iPhone simulator that comes with the SDK works pretty well, and even includes Safari so you can test your web apps. One of the screenshots above shows the simulator running on my iMac desktop with iSkyGaze running.
- Tight Sandbox: There are some basic low-level things I wanted to do in the SDK and could not because Apple locked it down pretty hard. A great example is the camera. The SDk does not allow you to programatically take a picture without the user interacting. The UIPickerView class brings up the camera dialog and makes the user press the shutter. There is no way to just take a picture myself.
All this really means is that developing something like iSkyGaze Plus on the iPhone will take a little longer than planned. I am no longer confident in a release in time to distribute for iTunes. Overall, I think the SDk is pretty good, but is far from complete or perfect.
3 Responses:
I'm a Visual Studio guy working with Xcode also. It's been pretty painful so far but I'm picking it up quickly. You can open the "Research Assistant" from the Help menu for some help while coding. Also you should go into Xcode preferences/Code Sense and make sure it is enabled and set to "Immediate". Not nearly as good as intellisense but but at lease it's something.
Thanks Pete! I'll have to check that out. It is painful, but seems to get a litle better over time.
Hey guys, its my first time developing using XCode too... Indeed I've been pampered with Visual Studio... In XCode, there's just no way you can see all the possible properties and methods of an object after you type the ".", unlike in Visual Studio... References also for Cocoa/Objective-C are not that well documented compared to MSDN Library...
I hope Apple could offer a better IDE, having those features mentioned above... It'll surely make our learning and development faster...
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