OK, maybe its time we seriously encourage Alex to write an iPhone app! Two quotes from a recent Newsweek article:
“It’s kind of a gold rush,” says Brian Greenstone, who runs a tiny outfit (it’s just him and a few freelancers) called Pangea Software in Austin, Texas, that has created several hit games for the iPhone, including Cro-Mag Rally and Enigmo. Greenstone, 41, has been writing games for Apple’s computers for 21 years.
Steve Demeter, a 30-year-old programmer, built an iPhone game called Trism in his spare time, working nights and weekends. By the end of September he’d earned $250,000 in just two months.
Greenstone, of Pangea, wonders if he’ll ever write for the Mac again. What makes this work? I think a combination of a strong platform (the iPhone is really a fun environment to code for, very clean, very few limits), great SDK (iPhone apps are basically Cocoa apps, this Objective C programming environment has been tops since the days of NeXT, many rough edges are now silky smooth), and way easy distribution (its hard to imagine buying and installing an app being easier than it is on the iPhone with the App Store). You just have to add ideas and code. That’s the fun stuff!