Why did I wait so long? iPhone fun
So given the $200 price drop, and verizon’s stupid “dial *228” to fix all your woes attitude, convinced me to go get an iPhone, and all I have to say is, why did I wait so long? Even at the $600 price (what my old phone retailed for), it’s amazing. I was also impressed with the level of service I had at the tiny Apple store I went into. I told the greeter what I wanted as he let me in, next thing I know there’s another guy that comes to me with a pda (looked like it was running windows mobile), swipes my card, scans the box, and prints a receipt. All the while, there’s a big line in the back of the store at the registers. I was way impressed with the efficiency of the process – though I was forced to spend $0.01 for 4 hours (1/week) of one on one training by some apple geek which I found insulting.
Ok, enough of the backstory. You might have seen this all over the place, but it took me some time to figure out how to get 3rd party applications onto the iPhone — which turned out to be amazingly cleaner process than I had expected.
Installing 3rd Party Applications
First off, go to http://iphone.nullriver.com/beta/ , and download their installer.app. Turn off the autosynching in iTunes. Run the program and wait a long while (follow instructions). It took what seemed like 10 minutes for it to do what it needed to. Afterwards, the phone reboots, and you’re presented with an new icon, which is the installer application. Click on it, and start installing stuff. It handles downloading/installing, upgrading, and removing – and also supports multiple application archives.
Developing your own 3rd Party Applications
This part is going to be a bit incomplete, but I’ll post what I’ve figured out, not having any background in coding on the Apple OS. It turns out that they use objective C to code for it. It has something to do with Cocoa, and you need to code using the UIKit lib/class/whatever they call it for the user interface section.
I’m going to have a go at porting my HealthMonitor phone application over to the iPhone, as things just look nicer on the iPhone.