Jul 2, 2009

Developer Friendliness

This post is mainly in response to this tweet by PC-happy blogger Jeff Atwood, who recently bought his first iPhone:

“It was a giant middle finger to iPhone developers.” because Apple is just not a developer-friendly company. http://www.marco.org/122990476 — @codinghorror
Jeff, it seems, has never written any Mac or iPhone software. Apple is a very developer-friendly software company. Anyone who says otherwise has never used Xcode, one of the greatest IDEs around. They’ve never attended WWDC, where developers are given access to the people who write the very codebase that developers depend on. They’ve never seen the Apple Design Awards presentation, where even one-man developer shops can win a huge prize package and the respect of their peers, based purely on having a great application.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that the iPhone App Store isn’t a complete pile of shit. But that’s not developer-unfriendly — it’s seller-unfriendly. The entire process of building an iPhone application, from designing your interfaces in Interface Builder, to running together the great APIs that Apple provides to do pretty much anything you wish, is an amazing experience. It’s only the parts that touch the App Store: provisioning profiles, approval for sale (currently at 3 weeks), and horrible pricing points — that suck. But during the development process itself, Apple couldn’t be friendlier.
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