Code and cars

How time flies. The last article was posted in late may, and soon afterwards, I was hired for a neat little startup. I joke about how towing and software engineering are so closely related, but going from a large company to a small company is almost a study of polar opposites. It's to be expected, of course, from a job with clearly delineated start and stop times to a calling where clocking in isn't as important as getting the tasks done. There's still a lot of adjusting to do.

It's interesting, this iPhone rush. People that have never before touched a Mac suddenly are jumping into this fray because of the buzz of the iPhone. As a Cocoa developer, it's a wonderful feeling of "Our time has come!" For years, everyone focused on Java, or .Net. Because of Apple's decision to use only Cocoa or native app development, the vast majority of the industry is ill-prepared. It's as if Objective C was this ugly girl in school, the one who shows up at the reunion and her success has suddenly made her the center of attention.

I keep joking that someone should make an iPhone app that simulates a pan of water, so people can actually pan for gold with the iPhone.

Writing iPhone apps are hard. True, it could be much worse, and as cocoa developers, we're spoiled by the MacOS, but the iPhone App Store is quickly gaining notoriety as full of crappy apps and flashlight programs. A great deal of blame is laid at the feet of those rushing in without cocoa backgrounds, especially by the old guard. Even more is laid at the feet of the NDA, which limits idea exchange, and this has a lot of truth. But I've come to believe that the NDA causes an even more subtle issue. That of reliance on demo code.