Apple introduced the original iPad in April 2010, selling 300,000 devices on the first day of sale and a further three million in the first 80 days. With the iPad in its third incarnation, worldwide sales are set to exceed 60 million devices. So clearly this is big business.
Closer to home, passing through Stansted airport recently, I was amazed at the number of people producing an iPad, rather than a laptop, from their hand luggage to pass through the x-ray scanner.
Soliciting opinion from my co-workers, the inability to have multiple applications visible on same screen, as you do within Windows, would seem to have the iPad pegged as a secondary device to a main work machine. However, given the current growth trajectory of the iPad maybe this is due to change.
As a business software developer, reaching this large base of devices is compelling. What is attractive to developers is that all iPads run the same software, so we don’t have to worry about different screen sizes etc.
So how do we make the next blockbuster app, you may ask? The iPad interface, with its touch gestures and pinch-and-point smooth scrolling, is built on an interesting mix of technology. Apple’s developer technology is built on a platform called Cocoa or, to differentiate itself for iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod touch), Cocoa Touch. Cocoa is a set of libraries and is developed in a programming language called Objective C. Haven’t heard of it? Well, until the iPhone made its debut in 2007, nor had most of us IT geeks. Objective C is a 30-year-old programming language, which was developed in the 80s when Steve Jobs was pushed out by Apple’s board to start a new educational company called NeXT.
When Jobs re-joined Apple’s board in the late 90s, part of the deal was that Objective C and its development tools came too. Developing apps with this rather venerable toolkit takes time and patience and programmers need to learn skills that date back to a previous era. To this extent the effort to train developers or produce apps quickly exceeds, by a large factor, the effort to produce software for Microsoft Windows. Last year the Tiobe Index (which measures these sorts of things) showed that Objective C found the greatest growth of any programming language.
In my role of developing software I’ve embarked on a number of Objective C projects to take line-of-business applications and migrate them to this platform. Days and weeks can be spent just polishing the smallest aspect of how the user interface looks or managing how the device copes across different networks. We are finding ways to take software which runs on traditional PCs and adapting it to iOS.
The iPad seems to be leading the way to what the industry is now calling the “post-PC era”. I just hope that developers have enough time to re-learn all those old skills so we can build the next generation of software that our industry demands. -
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