atomicbird

It's an interesting time to be a Mac developer. With the release last week of the iPhone SDK, Apple suddenly opened up a whole new interesting platform to software developers. And as one might expect, those who have experience developing for Mac OS X have a huge head start when it comes to this new platform. Development for the iPhone uses the same tools, language, and even many of the same frameworks as the Mac.

I think I can say all of that, despite the NDA and Apple's rapidly-developing official position on what can be said and where. Earlier this week Apple reps announced that iPhone development could be discussed on Apple's Cocoa-Dev mailing list, but this was followed the next day by a hasty retraction. That is, one day the rule seemed to be "go a head, talk amongst yourselves", but by the next day this had changed to "don't you dare". I can only imagine the internal discussions. The official line may have changed again by the time you read this.

Anyway, in my case the nature of the SDK means that my daily routine has changed rather suddenly, in a nice demonstration of business on internet time. On Thursday the SDK was released. Friday I saw an ad on Craigslist for a company near me needing an iPhone developer. Saturday morning the company's CTO phoned me, and Monday I started doing iPhone development on a contract basis. And incidentally, soon afterward I started filing bugs with Apple against the SDK. Of course, it's still a beta release.

I don't often do contracts, but I really wanted to get a fast start on the iPhone, and what better way to do it? Aside from the same deal where I can continue working from home, I guess. Some aspects of the work mean that I really do need to be on-site for a lot of it, and I'm out of practice at making daily trips to an office.

Right now I'm splitting my time between this contract and my own apps. I'm not putting anything on hold or making fundamental changes to my business, but at the same time I didn't want to pass up this opportunity.