iPhone: First Impressions

Found some time to read the book whilst waiting for the nurse to continuously suck blood from me over 2 hours. Well my first impressions of iPhone development are:

• Interesting how it took off considering you can only develop on a Mac.
• It costs at least $99 to write, debug and sell an iPhone application, more if you didn't have a Mac to start with. So if I sold my application for $2.49, I will have to sell at least 60 copies to get my money back. Can someone let me know how easy it is to sell apps.
• I felt that Objective-C was a bit cryptic (e.g. @synthesize keyword generates the getters and setters for an attribute).
• The flexible syntax to support older versions of the language confused me a little (e.g. [object attribute]; is the same as object.attribute;). Personally I prefer the Java syntax.
• Memory management is definitely more difficult. You have to do it yourself. Without working on the Android yet, I wonder how it stacks up against the iPhone in terms of memory management as I believe it is done automatically.
• Xcode seems fairly straight forward. The Xcode Project Window is where you write your code.
• There is also an Interface Builder for painting the User Interface of course. On first look, it is a matter of connecting the interface components to the coded actions you want to fire when the event occurs. Sounds easy? Well at least the 'Hello World' application is. I wonder how much I can sell it for?
• Oh finally the book is a good beginner's guide. The examples are structured around the iPhones user interactions and libraries. I'm only 4 chapters in though.

In my next post I will attempt to start building my application's navigation in both the iPhone as well as on the Android. It will be interesting how productive and impartial I can be.