Hey Skroob, thanks for offering your experience. How do you find clients for contract and freelance work? Also when did you feel you were comfortable enough with the iOS api to start freelancing?
Offer HN: My experience in iOS app development
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Re: Offer HN: My experience in iOS app development
#12Hey Skroob, thanks for offering your experience. How do you find clients for contract and freelance work? Also when did you feel you were comfortable enough with the iOS api to start freelancing?
Happy to do it! This is the question I've gotten most. It's probably worth a future blog post, but I'll give you the short answer I've been giving others so far. The best thing is word of mouth. Once you have some happy clients, they will tell others. Mention to friends and other developers that you know that you're looking for contract work, and they will very often pass your name along to people. Sell your own apps, sometimes people will find them, contact you and ask you to do stuff that is similar. Finally, give boards like Elance a shot, but don't sell yourself short and take $15/hr jobs if you can't live on that.
As for your second question, I'm never 100% comfortable about this, which is kind of fun. I never know what someone is going to ask me to do next, but the API docs are good, the community is helpful and it's a fun platform to work on. There's lots of answers out there if you need them. However, I can tell you there are important things to know. For one, memory management is vital on iOS devices. The OS can and will remorselessly kill your app for using too much, without warning. Memory overuse is a crashing bug, do whatever you must to squash it dead.
Re: Offer HN: My experience in iOS app development
#13Do you think Sencha is worthwhile?
Is learning to code natively always preferred, or do you respect the idea of generalizing your platform?
Re: Offer HN: My experience in iOS app development
#14Do you think Sencha is worthwhile? Is learning to code natively always preferred, or do you respect the idea of generalizing your platform?
I haven't looked into Sencha but I have seen things like Appcelerator and Mono Touch. I personally have no problem with people who want to use some other framework to write iOS apps. It's good to know other languages (something I'm personally way behind on; I have a beginner's knowledge of Ruby and thats about it right now) and if Apple will let you build and sell apps written in other languages, I say go for it.