“I hired a developer on Elance to build my first iPhone app, this was my experience”

beauf

As they say a little knowledge is dangerous. Scratch the surface then make sweeping generalisations.

As has been said its probably more about getting attention than anything else.

professore

Tonight, I’ll begin learning how to develop apps for iOS devices. Stay tuned…

AHHAHHHAHHHHAAAAAA !!!! :D:D:D:D

That's the funniest thing I've read in years! What's he doing tomorrow night? Begin learning to do brain surgery? Bet he picks some tool that allows you to put buttons on a form.

The Corinthian

professore wrote: »

That's the funniest thing I've read in years! What's he doing tomorrow night? Begin learning to do brain surgery?

It's not brain surgery, in fairness.

Objective-C is something that a developer can actually learn in a weekend, if they want and already have knowledge and experience of OO-programming and C (or a language from that syntax family).

Thing is with this chap is that he's a pixel-pusher - he doesn't appear to have any programming experience and thus none of the above. So while it's not brain surgery, it might as well be for him.

ChRoMe

The Corinthian wrote: »

Thing is with this chap is that he's a pixel-pusher - he doesn't appear to have any programming experience and thus none of the above. So while it's not brain surgery, it might as well be for him.

This is the key point.

professore

The Corinthian wrote: »

It's not brain surgery, in fairness.

Objective-C is something that a developer can actually learn in a weekend, if they want and already have knowledge and experience of OO-programming and C (or a language from that syntax family).

Thing is with this chap is that he's a pixel-pusher - he doesn't appear to have any programming experience and thus none of the above. So while it's not brain surgery, it might as well be for him.

Firstly, I don't agree that being a good programmer requires less experience and skill than being a brain surgeon. There are very few good ones out there. Surgery has it's rockstars and plodders too. But that's another debate.

Perhaps what you say about Objective-C is true, but from a developer I know well and respect, his feedback was that iOS development is a massive pain compared to Android development, he did the same app for both and iOS took him orders of magnitude longer. Sample size of one, of course, YMMV, but that was his experience.

However, you are right. Even someone who is an out and out geek will take months to become competent in programming in any language - there is just too much information and skill to digest in a few evening classes.

The Corinthian

professore wrote: »

Firstly, I don't agree that being a good programmer requires less experience and skill than being a brain surgeon.

In fairness, I meant in the context that I went onto describe. If you're already an experienced programmer, teaching yourself Objective-C isn't very complicated. If you're not, as with the author, it starts resembling brain surgery more and more.

However, you are right. Even someone who is an out and out geek will take months to become competent in programming in any language - there is just too much information and skill to digest in a few evening classes.

If it takes an "out and out geek" months to become competent in programming in a language, then they need to think about changing career.

Expert, sure, that's a high standard, but just 'competent'? Takes me a few days at most.

ChRoMe

The Corinthian wrote: »

In fairness, I meant in the context that I went onto describe. If you're already an experienced programmer, teaching yourself Objective-C isn't very complicated. If you're not, as with the author, it starts resembling brain surgery more and more.

If it takes an "out and out geek" months to become competent in programming in a language, then they need to think about changing career.

Expert, sure, that's a high standard, but just 'competent'? Takes me a few days at most.

Even such paradigm shifts as functional programming? I know several heavy weight developers in hedge funds here in London, very smart guys. Its taken them more than a week to get competent in some functional languages.

moycullen14

The Corinthian wrote: »

In fairness, I meant in the context that I went onto describe. If you're already an experienced programmer, teaching yourself Objective-C isn't very complicated. If you're not, as with the author, it starts resembling brain surgery more and more.

If it takes an "out and out geek" months to become competent in programming in a language, then they need to think about changing career.

Expert, sure, that's a high standard, but just 'competent'? Takes me a few days at most.

Actually, Objective-C is one of the view programming environments where I would disagree with you. The problem with Objective-C is that, for most people, everything is new. If it wasn't for the Apple ecosystem then almost nobody would use - or chose to use it - as a language.

The API (The real meat of most systems), the development environment, the OS, everything, really, is new and unfamiliar. It takes a long time and is tricky. Normally when you migrate from one language/system to the next, it is a gradual process. ObjectiveC/iOS is usually a step change.

The only ones I have come across who do it successfully and well have immersed themselves in iOS development and they would claim it took about a year to become 'expert' in it and be able to develop complex applications.

'Developer who I paid peanuts annoyed me so I'm going to learn to be a developer in a few days' Epic fail!

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

well it's subjective but I agree with moycullen14 and found iOS coding pretty tricky and a big change coming from a PHP (i know everybody's judging me!) and Java/Android background. it eventually clicked with me and I like Xcode but Objective-C can still be very peculiar.

• objective c. they just don't make common stuff easy for the developer apart from the @string. for one example, compare how you concatenate strings in java and obj-c: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/510269/how-do-i-concatenate-strings
• android and java debugging info is very helpful. it gives you a full stacktrace of where the error occured. iOS can crash and just dump some hex and send you to uiapplicationmain. but i guess this is a result of android compiling to bytecode and iOS being proper native.
• common stuff in iOS is just harder than it should be. if you want a scrollview in android, you just encapsulate your layout XML in a <ScrollView> and you're done. in iOS, you're messing with the x,y and size of your scrollview and content size. you need to manually calculate the height of your subviews so you can tell UIScrollView the height! Madness. The end developer shouldn't have to worry about these things.
• i prefer android xml layouts to interface builder. interface builder can work great but i just feel it's trying to make it too easy when iOS and Objective-C is not easy. when it works, it can work great. but when some small settings is set in a XIB causing a bug, it might takes ages to find. and god help you if you try to manually read the nib XML, it's not human readable.
• Intents and fragments. Easier to move between screen (activities) and create layouts that you can build together on a tablet vs. phone.

i went a bit off-topic but I'd like to see how long it will take Mike the client to learn this stuff to re-make his Santa app. He has to get his head around the MVC and view controllers to move between screens and scrollview is in the app as well. Common stuff which should be easier in iOS but it isn't.

Colonel Panic

The Corinthian wrote: »

In fairness, I meant in the context that I went onto describe. If you're already an experienced programmer, teaching yourself Objective-C isn't very complicated. If you're not, as with the author, it starts resembling brain surgery more and more.

If it takes an "out and out geek" months to become competent in programming in a language, then they need to think about changing career.

Expert, sure, that's a high standard, but just 'competent'? Takes me a few days at most.

Competent at what? The syntax of Objective C? What does that get you?

georgiecasey wrote: »

well it's subjective but I agree with moycullen14 and found iOS coding pretty tricky and a big change coming from a PHP (i know everybody's judging me!) and Java/Android background. it eventually clicked with me and I like Xcode but Objective-C can still be very

Part of this is inexperience (no offence) when it comes to native languages. The advantages come with a reduction in syntactic sugar. Not sure why you weren't getting full stack traces with symbols when debugging iOS apps btw.

On a side note. Objective C's a weird language at times but I really like it. Especially with the most recent additions Apple have added over the past few years to make it a bit less... verbose.

moycullen14

georgiecasey wrote: »

well it's subjective but I agree with moycullen14 and found iOS coding pretty tricky and a big change coming from a PHP (i know everybody's judging me!) and Java/Android background. it eventually clicked with me and I like Xcode but Objective-C can still be very peculiar.

• objective c. they just don't make common stuff easy for the developer apart from the @string. for one example, compare how you concatenate strings in java and obj-c: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/510269/how-do-i-concatenate-strings
• android and java debugging info is very helpful. it gives you a full stacktrace of where the error occured. iOS can crash and just dump some hex and send you to uiapplicationmain. but i guess this is a result of android compiling to bytecode and iOS being proper native.
• common stuff in iOS is just harder than it should be. if you want a scrollview in android, you just encapsulate your layout XML in a <ScrollView> and you're done. in iOS, you're messing with the x,y and size of your scrollview and content size. you need to manually calculate the height of your subviews so you can tell UIScrollView the height! Madness. The end developer shouldn't have to worry about these things.
• i prefer android xml layouts to interface builder. interface builder can work great but i just feel it's trying to make it too easy when iOS and Objective-C is not easy. when it works, it can work great. but when some small settings is set in a XIB causing a bug, it might takes ages to find. and god help you if you try to manually read the nib XML, it's not human readable.
• Intents and fragments. Easier to move between screen (activities) and create layouts that you can build together on a tablet vs. phone.

i went a bit off-topic but I'd like to see how long it will take Mike the client to learn this stuff to re-make his Santa app. He has to get his head around the MVC and view controllers to move between screens and scrollview is in the app as well. Common stuff which should be easier in iOS but it isn't.

I think that's making the very common mistake of trying to 'translate' an android app into an iphone one. I think anyone doing this is going to create woeful code. The architecture, language, OS, libraries are very different so they have to be coded differently It isn't that one is better or worse - they're just different. Each has it's own benefits. I don't care how good you are; getting to level where you can produce professional apps using iOS is a matter of months, not days.

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

This wasn't translating an Android app, this was a new iOS app. I'm just listing my opinion on what I don't like about iOS development. I agree it takes months to get half-decent.

Yes Colonel_Panic, a lot of it was probably inexperience with native. Memory allocation and all that stuff was new to me.

Trojan

I really don't know about the rest of you folks, but it took me the guts of a 4 year degree, several summers, and a couple of years after graduation before I was able to code anything decent. Sure, I could hack *something* together after a few months of college, that might be somewhat functional, but the gulf between that and commercially viable software vast. When I was at the height of my coding career, yes, I'd be able to pick up the syntax of a new language fairly quickly, but I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison with learning to code for the first time.