I received my first iPad today.  A very exciting time!  At this point I have finished a few apps and waiting on Apple to approve them for the iPad.

Let’s talk about some of the challenges of developing for the iPad:

First, you need one to test your apps on!  One of the applications that I submitted was using a webview to pull information from a WordPress website.  Unfortunately for me, the site had embedded flash video.  Anyone who has been around the internet development world any length of time knows that Apple and Adobe are not getting along very well at this time (leaves developers feeling like a kid when the parents are fighting).  I will leave the discussion on the whole Apple/Adobe Flash for another time.  This was causing the app to crash on devices, not the simulator.  Apple kept sending the app back saying that the YouTube.Webview was causing a crash.  If I had a device to test it on, I believe I would have been able to catch the problem before it was submitted to the app store (I’ll discuss what we did to fix the problem at a later date).

Second, at this point in time, you have to have some type of developer’s license with Apple to be able to download the most recent SDK.  This might change in the future, but as of today (April 3, 2010), you have to have a Standard, Enterprise, or University Developer license to download the SDK.

A few weeks ago I created a demonstration of how to make a ‘Hello World’ app for the iPad.  I was prepared to place it on the web at that time, but was under a non-disclosure agreement with Apple.  Now that SDK 3.2 is out of beta, the non-disclosure is over and I can legally post the demonstration.

I have many more demonstrations that I am developing for the iPad, iPhone and Flash CS5.  If there is something specific you would like to see as a short how-to, please let me know!

And remember, as Cowboy Bob, use to say “Good guys don’t always wear white hats”.

Dr. Burton