Some quality time with the iPhone SDK

Last week I decided to dive into iPhone development and bought a Mac Mini – I was able to get a screaming deal on one thanks to Cyber Monday sales and online coupons. After downloading the iPhone SDK today I spent some time digging into the training videos (impressively done) and poked around some sample code. It sure brings back memories. When I was in college I spent quite some time working on the NeXT, playing with the Interface Builder app, writing a lot of Objective-C… for its time, the SDK and development tools for the NeXT were quite amazing.
A group of friends of mine formed a business around the NeXT after college (OmniGroup), and later became experts on Mac OS X since some of the tech for OS X was migrated from NeXT. But I hadn’t realized quite how much of the Mach kernel, Objective-C, Interface Builder etc had come over! (Of course, it has all evolved a bit and been expanded upon.)
So it was an interesting good news / bad news day for me. Good news: Obj-C, Interface Builder, great! Bad news: uh, I haven’t used it for about 17 years. Time to kickstart some old brain cells.
Fortunately, after learning and working on the SDKs for probably 15 platforms now, few things surprise me and it’s pretty easy to knock up code for something new. And it’s really fun, too!