First off, developing for the iPhone is an exciting adventure. We thought about the best way for us to bring Cosential to the iPhone and we first considered building a web app, since that is where most of our experience lies. We have over 10 years in building and maintaining web applications so this was a no brainer. The problem was that the experience of using centered around the contact list and Cosential has one of the most advanced contact managers there is. One big problem was that we had no recent experience in building client applications, let alone using Objective C (the languarge of Mac OSX and the iPhone).
Cosential EIM Contact Manager Screen
We decided in May of this year to take the plunge and Phillip, one of our senior developers took a week long class in Objective C. He had also taken classes in C++ in college. So good so far. When he got back to our office we speced out a simple app to version contacts with Cosential. We had built this functionality into our web application in about 2 months, so we thought we had done all of the heavy lifting. We then also involved Josh and he learned how to develop interface work. Damon worked on the versioning technology. The lesson here is NEVER ASSUME
We started in earnest in late June. We thought we would get it done by the end of July or early August. Using our normal planning process and adding a fudge factor, we had assumed that it would be the same effort to build our app as a web application plus some time for a learning curve. Today is Nov 12, 2008 and we are now feature complete and the application is stable. We have added a number of features to the application, but I can truly say that it takes 2-3 times the effort to build a iPhone app than a web app. T We are now in final beta testing and are very excited that we will submit our application to Apple in the next couple of days. Here is a screen shot of the contact manager part. We use the native Apple address book data, but then we add additional data using SQL Lite. We ended up making the project more complex and feature rich, but in the end we have a great app.
Application pricing is the next big subject for us and I will discuss this in another post.
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November 12, 2008 at 9:29 pm
[...] Today is Nov 12, 2008 and we are now feature complete and the application is stable. We have added ...