I’ve been spending a few hours messing around with the MapKit part of the iPhone 3.0 SDK. I was able to easily get a scrollable google map up and running pretty quickly and then mess with rendering my own content on top of it. I need to be able to place multiple markers around the map, but I don’t want to use map annotations for all of them because the pins just look horrible. They’re fine for user locations, but pins everywhere just looks bad, plus they’re only available in red, green, and purple. So, I’m drawing my own markers on top of the map and that seems to be working well for the most part.
Going to keep messing with it for a bit and see if it’s definitely a piece of the sdk I want to continue to use.

I spent most of today giving a training course on iPhone development at FullSail. I think the presentations and tutorials I put together were fairly useful. The purpose of the class was to take someone from never touching iPhone development, and some of them never touching a Mac, to getting a few simple applications up and running in a short amount of time. I covered just the absolutely required objective-C constructs and explained more about how memory allocation works as I went along. The whole alloc/init/retain/release thing is difficult for people just starting out to really grasp.

As nervous as I was going into this, I feel it came off pretty well. Now to get back to my comfy zone with DirectX =^..^=

Today my latest project went live, Cat Calls. An adorable little application that will both annoy your pets, entertain your friends and look cute doing it.

You can find more information at my company website.

I’m moving all my new handheld development away from the iPhone. The app store is too flooded with junk applications causing consumers to lose any confidence in the quality of software they find there. No matter how much time and effort you spend, the drive for a lower price point makes development difficult to justify. There are also instances of some “developers” flooding certain app store categories with fifty of the same application. This is what happens when you get that gold rush mentality.

Microsoft announced their application store the other day and so far I like what I’m seeing. Microsoft restricts the number of applications a developer can release in a given year with each additional application requireing more of a financial investment. I’m hoping this will eliminate the overpopulation of poor quality seen on the Apple app store.