iPhone development…

After a long slog ironing out some last-minute bugettes (and a major performance issue I’d accidentally introduced by attempting to bubble-sort an 10,000-entry strong list) I’ve just posted an updated release of Æther Tool to Apple for approval.

This is my first commercial app, admittedly, but it has taken a great deal of time, sweat, and (almost ;) tears to progress this far… and it makes me wonder how other small- or one-man developers approach the development process and how long this generally takes.

And now, following in the footsteps of the seminal “How 12 Hours, 2 Guys, 6 Cups of Coffee = 1 iPhone App there’s Sahil Lavingia‘s oneweekapp.com.

Whilst “Stuck?” is largely a bit of fun and it definitely a single-task application, the two developers do make some very valid points about iPhone development. This helps put Sahil’s herculean task into perspective – in a single week, this single developer hopes to complete a brand-new application which looks to be impressively ambitious (in a good way!)

Note that the above video is the state of the application only 28 hours after inception. That’s impressive. Almost 48 hours to the minute after starting, this post shows the current state of the UI. Classy.

I’m fascinated to see how this goes, and how complete an application developed in only a single week can possibly be – I’m sure I’ve spent longer than that (on and off, admittedly) fighting against bugs in the current SDK! I guess it shows what a focussed developer dedicated solely on a single project can do. I can’t imagine that this pace could be sustainable for extended periods of time – but it’s going to be fascinating to see where Dayta goes…