By that logic, it's a much better time to be an Android developer as long as you support 2.2 and up.
You bring the dynamite, I'll bring the pickaxe & canary, let's gold rush!
John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
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Re: John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
#12This might be true of Apple, but it is definitely true of both the software industry and theoretical CS. The industry is expanding--computers are getting cheaper and more plentiful so we need more and more software. Since we also have more computational power in our hands, we can do more and more interesting things with computers.
Theoretical computer science is also in an exciting time--it is a nascent field with many exciting discoveries and inventions to be made even without gigantic budgets. I think it's something like physics in the early 20th century, before they started needing gigantic particle accelerators and the like (I'm sure physics is still exciting and I'm just showing my ignorance, but I think there's a parallel nonetheless).
Right now is a perfect time to be a developer or computer scientist anywhere, not just at Apple.
Re: John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
#13I usually find Gruber's tone to be arrogant and unnecessarily facetious. But I think his analogy is great.. "This is like being a Rock and roll musician in the late sixties. This is like being a film maker in the seventies..."
Do you also like job postings looking for "rock stars" and "ninjas"?
Re: John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
#14I don't want to under-estimate the importance of movable type...but what has Gruber developed? Looking at the list at http://daringfireball.net/projects/ doesn't exactly fill me with shock and awe. I'd imagine with his huge following in the apple community he could put almost anything on the app store and it would sell. Can someone enlighten me? I guess my meta-point is, why am I reading software development career a…
He's a pundit, but he's really close with all of the influential developers in the community. He's more in tune with the Apple community than perhaps any one other person, and his track record of being right is unmatched in the last several years.
hmm, who are the influential developers in the iOS community?
Re: John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
#15I don't want to under-estimate the importance of movable type...but what has Gruber developed? Looking at the list at http://daringfireball.net/projects/ doesn't exactly fill me with shock and awe. I'd imagine with his huge following in the apple community he could put almost anything on the app store and it would sell. Can someone enlighten me? I guess my meta-point is, why am I reading software development career a…
How many pundits are developers? How many have co-created markup languages?
Gruber's technical abilities and his keen understanding of how Apple works give him more bonafides than most of the people writing tech columns in the field today.
Re: John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
#16It would be interesting to know, why being an Apple developer is favourable to being any other type of a developer? For example, android market share is already larger than Apple devices, and people still spend lots of time in front of traditional web browsers. You can still make fortunes and/or have an interesting career with other platforms and technologies too.
In a word: Gruber. His bias towards Apple is unmatched.
Re: John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
#17tldr; Develop for the App Store and you could be famous and make loads of money like , or don't and you might just regret your entire life.
Re: John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
#18"One simple way to look at it is that there are far more people who've never bought an iPhone and who've never bought an iPad, who will in the next five years than all of us who've already bought at least one to this point." That's one simple way to look at it. Another slightly less simple way is that the ones that already have Apple devices are the savviest, hippest, and spendiest consumers around, and you can't pos…
Your comment rests on the assumption that the savviest ones are also the spendiest ones, which most would probably disagree with.
Re: John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
#19Gruber is like a person who really enjoys eating cupcakes. He knows all about cupcakes, and even goes so far as to think he knows how to make them. He's probably baked a few things here and there. Sadly, he also thinks his 'expertise' on all things cupcakes makes him an all round bonafide chef.
Re: John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
#20I usually find Gruber's tone to be arrogant and unnecessarily facetious. But I think his analogy is great.. "This is like being a Rock and roll musician in the late sixties. This is like being a film maker in the seventies..."
Do you also like job postings looking for "rock stars" and "ninjas"?
I should probably clarify why I think the analogy works; It's an exciting time, it's changing rapidly, there's a lot of opportunity and developers are garnering a lot of focus from a lot of different areas.