Last year I was working on a Nine Men's Morris mobile game called Doublemill. My job was to implement a REST-based server back-end on the Google App Engine. You might remember a couple of posts on that. My colleagues were responsible for coding the Android client. Since I'm an iPhone user and I'm not going to switch to Android anytime soon, I decided to port the game to the iPhone/iPod touch platform.This will be a series of blog posts on how a rookie at Objective-C and the whole iPhone OS came about to release an iPhone app.
I started out with a complete UI, stitched together in Interface Builder in only 15 minutes and ended up on a roller-coaster ride with 3 weekends straight spent on coding and a lot of understanding from my wife. It was really amazing bringing the game to life.
That brings me to the first difference between being a Java back-end guy and an iPhone developer. It's not so much the different programing languages or operating systems, but the fact that you bring something to life. You can hold it in your hands an show it to people. I can even show it to my parents and they can give it a try.
When I was working on the back-end of Doublemill, the only thing I was able to show someone was an URL and the JSON response when you make a HTTP GET. Although my wife is very supportive, when it comes to my pet projects, she's much more pleased with an iPhone App than with a JSON response.
I learned a lot about the iPhone platform, the tool chain and Objective-C during the past couple of weeks and I must say, I get more and more intrigued with diving in completely. I'll blog a lot more once Doublemill Lite, the first version is out the door, until then there's still a lot to do.
