iPhone App Submission - iHubHealth 1.0

Well... it took us a little longer then we anticipated but working on a software project with a distributed team effort can be difficult. The team invested loads of personal time, work time and a host of weekends and nights but we're finally done. We're pretty proud of our application - iHubHealth 1.0

and we just submitted the application to Apple... here's hoping on a seamless (and quick) release to the application store.

This application was more difficult than others because the content we had the team gather had to be vetted, organized, ranked, checked and rechecked over and over again. This is much easier said than done especially when you're dealing with dozens of blogs and hundreds of news channels. Blogs are real tricky... lots of good blogs that are stale or dead and lots of bad blogs that get updated daily. Your content people really have to take their time to read the blogs to make sure there not just commercial fronts with fluff content.

Along with the normal complexity of XML-based software development and Objective-C it became somewhat of a bear of a project. Anyway... the 80 hour weeks are over and we hope people enjoy the result.

We have an entire suite of these apps in the pipeline... we have most of the administrative applications complete and we have the entire server-side infrastructure complete too. We just need to write some web based UIs on to help administer and maintain the channels which we can push with dynamic updates to the devices.

Look for new titles every couple of weeks. Keep checking the blog for updates.

Early DEV Thoughts on Objective-C

I've been a developer for over 15 years.  I started out with primarily C and C++ on UNIX during my undergrad years and during my first couple of years in the industry.  

I shifted to Borland C++ and eventually Microsoft Visual C++ during the early MFC days (ouch) and then went on the usual migration path of Visual Basic 6.0 -- Visual Basic .NET -- C#.NET development.   I've also done a good amount of scripting from REXX to VBscript to Javascript.

BUT I have to admit - developing using Objective-C is a pretty painful experience.  Even though my engineering side appreciates the flexibility and the seemingly robust combination of MVC UI infrastructure integrated with dynamic progamming elements (runtime methods, etc) topped off with asynchronous messaging facilities and the like... I'm slightly disappointed at the difficulty of the "development experience".  For all the flexibility - not enough is done in the language (and the development environment) to ease or "control" the experience for the developer and let's not even talk about memory management.  You're pretty much thrust into the soup... not sure about how effective this is when you're trying to expand your developer base.

I know with time I'll appreciate the flexibility of the language once I'm comfortably ramped up the learning curve - but this language is pretty painful - or maybe I'm just being a little punk.  Sorry for the vent.