Geeks only (you have been warned)<\/p>\n
Regardless of how fun and friendly a development environment may be, the bullshit accompanying it can ruin everything. For example, and completely at random, let’s compare iPhone development to Qt development. <\/p>\n
X-Code (the iPhone\/Mac dev IDE) is at the usable and comfortable end of my IDE spectrum. Objective C is by far my favourite programming language, and the Apple run-time systems are luxurious (mmmm…Quartz and OpenGL). The IDE is free (as in beer).<\/p>\n
Qt provides an IDE even less objectionable than X-Code, that will let you build, test, debug and produce code on multiple devices. It prefers C++ (which I generally hate), but makes it usable, secure, and viable, via its own well-designed API. BTW – the boost\/STL advocates out there are free to go and fuck right off with the .NET developers. It’s also free (as in beer and speech).<\/p>\n
Where the iPhone experience fails (IMO) is with all of the extra crap you have to do to run an app on it: developer profiles, provisioning profiles, distribution profiles etc, etc, are a tortuous pastime, even for someone like me who knows and loves encryption. It’s a tremendous hassle and provides almost zero advantages. It also provides a million unhelpful and foggy error messages that are totally impossible to understand unless you were in the team that developed the API.<\/p>\n