Just watched Lee Brimlow’s quick demo of Flash CS5 saving out an iPhone app. Watch it!

Now, first things first, we’ve made a few iPhone apps at Digital Outlook already in native Objective C and although I’m nowhere near being even remotely classed as a developer, I have been on a basic iPhone dev course and have spent a good length of time debugging and mildly fiddling with the existing apps we have. I’ve made a few simple apps myself so I’ve got a fair understanding of how it works I guess.

I’ve also go a VERY acute understanding of the process and costs involved in creating a native iPhone app from scratch from within an agency. At the beginning, they said “take a Flash app, budget the coding part, double it and add another half”. Cool. Nowhere near. Without going into detail, it seems iPhone App development isn’t quite as simple as it’s made out to be. Yes, your developer may know Objective C, applying it to the iPhone development environment is another thing. Us Flash guys could only stare on as seemingly simple issues took days and weeks to resolve.

So the fact that the Flash SC5 release will compile to iPhone is immense news for me, us and probably every digital agency and Flash freelancer on the planet. Sure there are things it can’t do. Sure you get a bundled app that you can’t ‘add to’ in the native development environment. Sure you can’t use the camera and a few other api’s. And it may be a bit slower than a native app, but take it from me, I’ll take all of those on the chin for the ability to get a creative idea onto the iPhone and into the hands of the world’s mobile consumers.

I can’t wait for CS5 to drop but in the mean time, here are some of my observations from native iPhone development from my Flash perspective.

• Objective C may look like AS3 but it works in a whole different way. From declaring variables to having a .h header file to your .m main class files. Don’t even think of using a ‘Trace’ or C ‘Print’ command. Underestimate the differences at your peril… but don’t be scared either. If I can do it, so can you! (No, seriously, I’m not that clever).
• Debugging already written code is really easy when you know your way way around. Moving graphics, font sizes, swapping sounds, changing text etc. are all pretty straightforward with a simple search to narrow down the location to work on.
• The assets are held externally to the project, so changing graphics, movies, audio etc. is simple too, just swap out the file and recompile.
• The graphics are just plain old JPEGs and PNG files, so your designers are more than up to the job. It’s just like a Flash project as far as that goes.
• If you have time / money, put a rough Flash demo together first. Changing your mind and feature creep during production can be slow and costly.
• The iPhone development suite is really slick (unlike Android I may add!). The on-screen emulator is great and allows you do test it (with a few exceptions) without needing an iPhone or a developer account.
• If your app uses accelerometers, cameras etc. the emulator will fall short as it’s can’t ‘emulate’ an accelerometer. You can get around it by installing an app on your phone to transmit the accelerometer data to your mac, then add a little code to your iPhone build to receive the data and substitute the values in the emulator. Here’s an example of screen-capturing the emulator using this technique. See the Accelerometer Simulator by Otto Chrons for more.
• The icon is VERY important. Make sure you spend time on it. And by the way, the glassy shine and round corners are automatically added to your icon on the phone itself. You can switch the shine off though, but not the corners.
• If you don’t have them in-house, freelance iPhone developers will charge you anywhere from £250-£500 a day.
• If you shop around and do your research, you soon find out that the cheap way to get an iPhone app done is to go ‘off-shore’. South America, China and India are all much cheaper than your average LA, London or New York dev agency. However, they do come with the usual health warnings about production values, creative sign-off and time-zone / communication problems.
• If you have the money and it’s your first app, get someone local to hold your hand and learn from. If not, make sure you have scoped the project within an inch of its life. After the project, budget for an extra half-day for your iPhone dev to explain what he/she did to your Flash dev team. Shame to pay all that money and lose all the knowledge.
• Memory management is now your problem. You have to allocate memory and release it as you go. This is one of the big areas that Apple check when you submit your app to the App Store. You don’t have to allocate actual memory size as in assembly language, but you do have to ‘manage’ closely.
• Do register with Apple and get a developer account. You can get the dev environment for free and start compiling but you can’t transfer anything onto your iPhone without a developer license and associated provisioning files.
• While I mention it, the process to authorise your computer and set up your first app is a bit of a faff. Still not 100% sure I understand it but the instructions on the Apple site are clear enough to get you started.
• The app submission process is pretty simple and the time taken to get a response is anywhere from 2-4 weeks. I know the guys at Apple and even they can’t affect this process, so don’t ask! However, in general, if your app is basic and doesn’t have any advanced functionality such as external database calls or live data, you go into a ‘less risky’ pool, and are generally through in less time. If you are rejected, you go to the back of the queue.
• Make sure you look at what everyone else is doing too. Download everything remotely related to compare. Look at the top 3 in each category too, there’s a reason they are there, whether it’s the content, the execution or the user-interaction. It’s all vital knowledge.
• The ‘Games’ category is the most varied and the most competitive. Before you assume your first app should be a game, consider that it will be up against the EA’s and the Need for Speed’s of this world. If you’re not in the top 20 pretty quickly, you pretty much free-fall until you become all but invisible to the regular browsers.
• To charge or not to charge? 59p says “Aaaah, hell, why not”. £2.99 says “This better be good or I’ll tell everyone it’s a rip off and rate it 1 star”. Initially, you need to go for ratings, so consider an introductory low rate then change it if you see an appetite and good ratings. It’s easy to change the price on the fly.
• And finally, if you can wait until April 2010, consider using Flash CS5! :)

Yep… I make my first iPhone app and it really is that simple to compile. No reason for the Chuck Norris image really, I had to use something. I don’t actually have an iPhone yet so I even find the emulator fun to play with at the moment.

The Xcode development platform absolutely rocks but if I’m honest, I only get half of it. It really is a half and half thing. The half I get is the interface constructor, the UI libraries and so on. The half I don’t get is the slightl weird Visual C syntax of the code. If you know C or maybe even AS2 or 3, some of it will be familiar but the rest is propper strange. Most of the answers to “why?” are “because you have to”. Still, I fully realise its my lack of cleverness rather than Apple’s dev platform. They seem to have done pretty well with it so far.

Anyway, I’m off to get some more skill, so watch this space.