> I've heard a lot of complaints about developing for the iPhone, but none about the quality of the development environment. Consider this your first, then: th

> I've heard a lot of complaints about developing for the iPhone, but none about the quality of the development environment. Consider this your first, then: the iPhone development environment sucks. People are using it despite the suckage or because they don't know any better. I do have an app in the app store, but the experience of making it was so painful - the cruftiness of Objective C, the gawdawful poorly-integrated mess of the Interface Builder, and various DRM issues - that I just couldn't take it anymore. I had a long list of apps I wanted to build next and features I wanted to add to the one I had, but programming for the iPhone turned out to be so unpleasant that I couldn't stand doing it. The same sense of aesthetics that makes me really like using the iPhone makes me dislike using Objective C or the iPhone dev environment in general. By way of reference, I really enjoyed programming for the Newton using the Newton Toolkit and NewtonScript, and I really enjoy using Ruby. Ruby and NTK were discoverable in ways that the iPhone toolchain is not. My chief hope, if I ever wanted to develop more iPhone or iPad apps, was that third parties would jump in and fill the gap with more mac-like development tools that I could stand to use on a regular basis. Maybe something like Corona. I could even hope that competition from third party development environments might lead Apple to improve theirs. But no, these hopes have been dashed. So I guess I'll have to continue not developing iPhone apps. Oh, and consider the posts on this blog your second-through-tenth complaints: http://www.iphonerant.com/ http://www.iphonerant.com/