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App Dev Secrets (appdevsecrets.com)

Ever download a small app for the iPhone and realize it’s simplicity? Like an eighth grader could program it? Did you ever look to see how much money that eighth grader was raking in with iPhone apps?

AppDevSecrets is a course that instructs how to hit the ground running with developing an iPhone or iPad app or game and cash in at the app store. This particular course isn’t only anti Objective-C, but doesn’t even require programming experience or knowledge!

Time is running out for jumping onto the app building bandwagon and you seriously don’t want to miss this huge opportunity.

App Dev Secrets is highly recommended.

Gamesalad (gamesalad.com)

GameSalad is essentially a point and click, drag and drop game creation program that allows the creative among us to finally create games for the iPhone and iPod Touch without any programming necessary.  The product is tagged as “Game Creation for the Rest of Us”.  Complete with templates (yes, a basic shoot-em-up is just one click away) and sprites from butterflies to zombies.

Gamesalad also allows publishers to upload web versions of their games (and offers hosting to boot).  For iPhone publishing, you need to purchase a membership to Gamesalad.com.  Game creators can choose either the $99 yearly membership rate or the the pro rate for $1999 per year.  The $99 membership adds a few constraints to the feature set of the game, but both memberships give game creators all royalties earned from the game in the App store.  From what I can tell, apps built with the Gamesalad membership are injected with a Gamesalad splash screen.  But since you’re collecting all the royalties from the sale of the app, who cares, really.  Note that this cost does not include the $99 yearly iPhone developer program membership fee for Apple.

Ansca Corona SDK (www.anscamobile.com)

Ansca claims that with the Corona SDK, a developer can create “high-performance multimedia graphically rich applications and games for the iPhone.  No Objective-C/Cocoa required, and no C++”.

Instead of using Apple’s Objective-C, you use Lua (Loo-ah), a powerful, fast, lightweight embeddable scripting language (www.lua.org).

Similar to Gamesalad, in order to build applications for the App Store with the Corona SDK, you must purchase a $99 yearly membership fee.  The biggest difference that I can see between the Gamesalad and Corona membership programs is that at the $99 rate, the app isn’t injected with a branded splash screen.  In fact, people who download the app will have no idea that it was built under the Corona SDK program. Note that this cost does not include the $99 yearly iPhone developer program membership fee for Apple.  Also note that the homepage for Corona says that the iPad is “Coming Soon…”

QuickConnect (quickconnect.sourceforge.net)

QuickConnect is a “family of frameworks” for a variety of platforms including the iPhone, Android, Symbian and Blackberry for creating mobile applications.  QuickConnect essentially allows you to program iPhone apps using html, javascript, css and all that jazz.  The framework provides hooks for iPhone functions such as GPS, audio, SQLite database, accelerometer information, etc…

Using the QuickConnect framework, you don’t have to sign up for anything.  In fact, it’s completely free.  You simply import the template for the platform that you’re developing for, write your html and javascript and you’re gold.  Of course, there will be less features available, compared to what either Gamesalad or Corona SDK offer, but for simple applications, this may be the ticket to an incredibly quickly developed product. Again, xcode and an Apple Developer Program license are required in order to build and distribute applications.

PhoneGap (phonegap.com)

PhoneGap is similar to QuickConnect, in that you use javascript and html to develop your application, however it seems to be a little more polished of a framework.  You will need to know javascript fairly well.  From what I’ve seen, however, most web developers wouldn’t have a problem using the framework.

Bonus with PhoneGap is that it’s completely open source (ie pretty much free for developers).  The user base seems fairly significant and it looks like quite a few apps have been developed with it.

NimbleKit (www.nimblekit.com)

Again, this is another framework that allows you to develop iPhone apps with your web development skills.  Unlike some others, however, NimbleKit is not free or open source.  To build apps for distribution, it costs a one time fee of $99 to use NimbleKit.  Again, similar to Gamesalad and Corona, this is on top of the $99 Apple iPhone Developer Program fee.
NimbleKit does seem to give programmers a greater number of features than PhoneGap though, including the ability for apps to play internet video and audio streams.

MonoTouch (monotouch.net)

Here’s something a little different than the rest.  If you’re looking to produce compiled code for the iPhone but aren’t up for objective-c and otherwise do have some C# .Net skills, then MonoTouch may be exactly what you’re looking for.  MonoTouch allows developers to create C# .NET applications that run on the iPhone and iPod Touch.  The developers of MonoTouch have also ported many great frameworks to the platform, even frameworks for getting Apple push notification working with your .NET app.

This may be very cool stuff, but it does come with a pricetag that most iPhone developers probably may not be to interested in.  At $399 for the Professional edition, it is pretty steep when compared to offerings from other companies.

Appcelerator Titanium Developer (www.appcelerator.com)

Appcelerator Titanium Developer is another product that allows developers to code their iPhone or Android apps with good old HTML and Javascript.  It may be the most feature filled framework of its kind and has recently announced iPad support.

Titanium Developer is available on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms (although for iPhone development, xcode is obviously also needed and therefore a Mac is required).  Despite having a large feature set and a huge active developer base, Titanium Developer is somehow free.

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