"I took an iOS class last year and got completely intimidated by Objective-C. It felt like I had to write a lot of code to do simple things and in my mind’s eye any potential app idea I would want to work on was getting crushed before I could even take it seriously."
I want to call out this particular line: "It felt like I had to write a lot of code to do simple things"
I dived into iOS development full on a couple of months back, and have to say, after extensive experience dealing with Android, BlackBerry and PhoneGap.. the iOS framework is phenomenal. I have found that more often than not you will NOT have to write a lot of code to do simple things (the same may even apply for seemingly complex things!).
It takes a little bit of getting used to, but after it all clicked, I feel like an idiot for feeling intimidated at all. To those that feel intimidated by the thought of iOS/Objective-C, I suggest diving in and giving it a shot. I promise, you'll love it.
I was in the same boat as you. Now I'm nearing 2 years into being an iOS developer and I am in a ridiculous love affair with Objective-C + Cocoa. It is verbose, but so what? I've shown my code to non-iOS devs and even though they may not know how to make iOS apps, they could understand what every line of code of mine did.
iOS also helped solidify a lot of basic Computer Science concepts that other languages seemed to hand-hold me through. I'm extremely grateful for taking on learning Objective-C because I feel it matured me professionally.
I like Ruby, it's a great language, but I think projects like RubyMotion and Phonegap are born out of either fear or unwillingness to learn Objective-C + Cocoa. To me, unless RubyMotion is officially adopted by Apple, there will always be drawbacks to using it.
Fair point. I focused a bit too much on the framework itself, but I was really trying to address the 'intimidating' nature of objective-c (as it relates to getting things done in iOS). Certainly I can appreciate the verbosity in comparison and I know where RubyMotion has it's place. Just saying for the folks that are intimidated by objective-c (and have yet to give it a shot): try not to be!
My intimidation doesn't come from the difficulty of Objective-C but 1) The time it takes to build iOS apps using Objective-C and 2) verboseness. I explained above that I think it would take twice as long to build the same app in Objective-C and that thought intimidates me as for most of us the apps we're building are experiments. We don't know if it will catch on or not. And I would like to see results as quickly as possible, especially in a bootstrapped project like this.
I want to call out this particular line: "It felt like I had to write a lot of code to do simple things"
I dived into iOS development full on a couple of months back, and have to say, after extensive experience dealing with Android, BlackBerry and PhoneGap.. the iOS framework is phenomenal. I have found that more often than not you will NOT have to write a lot of code to do simple things (the same may even apply for seemingly complex things!).
It takes a little bit of getting used to, but after it all clicked, I feel like an idiot for feeling intimidated at all. To those that feel intimidated by the thought of iOS/Objective-C, I suggest diving in and giving it a shot. I promise, you'll love it.