[brador]

I love postmortems! Could you give more details on the app...how long did it take to develop? How many people worked on it? Did you outsource parts of it? Any ongoing costs (eg, APIs etc.)? Any interesting side stories?

Also, what would you say is your total estimated cost for making the app from start to finish?

[x1r0]

We're a team of 2. I do all the development. All the work was done in-house... no outsourcing. The app, icon, and website were all us.

It took 3 months to get to version 1.0. We worked on it part time, nights and weekends. There were some big gaps as life and work got in the way. It was my first iOS development experience, and I had only dabbled in Objective-C previously, so most of that time was getting up to speed with the language and framework. I primarily work in Ruby.

There are no real ongoing costs. The website is completely static, so hosting is negligible. We use Google's local search and directions APIs. Both of them are free at our usage levels.

It cost $99 for the Apple developer license. That's all the capital all we invested. The rest of it was just time.

[brador]

Awesome, thanks for the details. You mentioned only dabbling previously, any tips on learning iphone app programming quickly? What tools/things did you use to learn? Any recommendations? Did you use any books/guides?

Finally, did you use a mac pro or imac? and if it's relevant, does the glossy screen cause eye strain when programming for extended periods?

[x1r0]

I still remembered a decent amount of C from high school & college (I'm just old enough to have snuck through before Java took over CS). I brushed up on the ol' K&R and then read about 2/3rds of O'Reilly's Programming iOS 4 book.

Apple's documentation and sample code is excellent, and really nicely integrated into XCode. Once iOS 5 came out, I learned almost exclusively from there. Of course, Stack Overflow is great for very specific gotchas and questions.

I did all the work on a MacBook Pro, with glossy screen, usually plugged in to a 27" Apple display (also glossy). The gloss doesn't cause me any problems unless I sit in very bright sunlight, but all things equal, I would prefer matte. Xcode is a bit of a pig, so it definitely does best on a big display.