DevDays - iPhone Development

I was at the DevDays iPhone day today, and I left early. It was just not development-packed enough for my liking.

I've never used Objective-C, or Cocoa, but that doesn't mean I want to hear about how the syntax differs from Java, or C#. I was there to see the best way to make iPhone apps.

I can open the tools, open all the bits and pieces associated with the SDK, read the syntax, what I don't know yet are the best practices in development.

What I did learn are some interesting factoids:

• Most apps are used for about 30 seconds at a time
• If you say you will support both the iPhone and the iPod Touch, you can't drop support for the Touch at a later date.
• The OS will kill apps that use too much memory
• Parental control of apps is coming is OS 3.0 (so games such as Dope Wars will be allowed)
• Updates are always free - I wonder will this change. If I write an app for OSX I can charge for people to move between major versions. I suspect this will change in the years to come.

Also of note was the fact that apple are 'constantly updating their OS' - this was put forward as a plus. 'Yay, look at us, we release lots of OS updates'. I don't know if it is though. Updates are a pain, updating my phone once every six months is as frequent as I could tolerate, and I'm a techie. It's not the technical aspects of updating that bother me, it's the process, it takes hours.