But here's the kicker: I have only ever programmed in C, and have almost zero experience in terms of dealing with graphics.

My app would be pretty much just for doing maths on, the sort of thing I do at work - but for quick, on site calcs that would often be done on the back of a fag packet in a site cabin. I've looked on the store and there are 4 or 5 competitors, but all are written to American codes and none to British Standards...

...so with books being available, at maybe £30 each, £100 for the SDK thingy, and Apple taking a 20% slice, I'd have to shift say 150 apps at 99p each to cover my costs. And it'd have to work.

It'd be aimed at other Engineers like me, but now I think about it, lazy undergraduates would probably try it too.

Anyone think I'm bat-**** crazy?

EDIT:

*** packet? Ah well, cigarette packet then.

Objective C looks funny, but there's only a few extra things to learn beyond C. The main thing to learn is the Cocoa API, but that'll do most of the UI stuff for you out of the box (unless you want to do crazy custom UI stuff).

The alternative is to do it as a web app using html5 local storage stuff (which safari supports), that would be effectively free to get onto iphones, but you'd have to come up with your own way to make money from it.

I would say do it just for the experience and personal benefit. I have no idea if you will make a profit, I probably wouldnt count on it.

Oh I can afford the money, it'd be nice to turn a profit though. I'm definitely leaning toward app store rather than mobile safari because the exposure is greater, and making (some) money would be easier. If it ever happens.

And yeah, the graphics would be simple to the point of non-existence.

Me help?

If I get started, definitely

Also, since it's a niche app, I'd go for a more reasonable price point, say 2.99. As long as it's good at what it does, people will pay for it, and you won't lose the impulse buyers because with this kind of app there aren't any.

I was thinking the exact same thing.

My name is really John Edwards, would you like to speak to your great great grandmother?

Stanford has an iPhone application programming class up on the iTunes U section, I downloaded it all in hopes of someday getting around to writing an app. From what I've seen of the classes they're pretty good introduction into Objective C.

There are other ways to write apps that don't really require you to do any Objective C yourself. There's the compiler that Adobe's adding into Flash CS5 that will allow you to compile Flash apps for the iPhone.

There's also stuff like MonoTouch, which lets you use C# to write iPhone apps. (Still have to work with the funky Cocoa UI builder in this case of course.)

Both of these options will of course cost you more than doing it in Objective C, since neither option itself is free, and you still have to pay for the $100 Apple developer membership.

Darth, anything that's not C will be new, so I might as well use Objective C

Timewolf, I'll check that out

I just despise Objective C's wacky syntax, which is why I mentioned other options.

you're definitely *not bat-**** crazy. Worst case scenario, you spend a little bit of money and develop a program that helps you with your day to day job. Best case scenario, you become the next iPhone app millionaire. :p

Speaking from experience, it's really not hard to learn objective c. It's an annoying language, especially how they name their methods (method name describes first argument, it's really odd), but definitely not difficult to pick up. You can get the SDK for free and not pay the $100 till you want to move from the simulator to actually deploying/testing on actual hardware. I was actually working on a 2d game with opengl and that wasn't very difficult either. Using the documented APIs is really easy.

The only problem with going through the App store is how long it can take. And they don't even have to accept you.