iHandwarmer

The iPhone is quite a little mobile platform. It's more like developing for a PC class device than it is an embedded mobile device. I recall being very careful with processing cycles back in my Palm days. I used fixed point math and lookup tables for formulas. Those days feel long gone now. This device is quite capable of dealing with as much floating point math I can throw at it.

All those burning MIPS make for quite an iHandwarmer!

1998: 33 MHz Motorola Dragonball VZ
2008: 412 MHz ARM 1176

Certificates, provisioning, and signing oh my!

Long gone are the good 'ol days of Palm OS development. You could quickly build an application and hotsync it to your device. Even better, you could quickly and easily use the Palm debugger to shoot a copy of the application and run it remotely.

The iPhone developer's life is riddled with hours upon hours of hassling with certificates, provisioning files, code signing, and ad-hoc distibution profiles. I've lost hours of my life here. The good news is that this work will only get easier for developers in the coming months as Apple improves the process. My pain will be forgotten.

iPhone Developers Program Portal acceptance

I can't believe it has taken nearly three months to be accepted into the iPhone development program. From what I read applying as a small entity company can delay the process. I hear of individuals being accepted in a matter of a few weeks.

The real shame is that you can't load any code onto a real device until you are accepted into the iPhone developers program. The simulator is only of so much use, it doesn't support the accelerometer or the camera. It also gives a false sense of UI element size and processing power.