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[fallen2]

How long does it take to be accepted into the program and what payment methods are there to pay the 99$?

[waruwaru]

Clippy says "you might be interested in this link."

[fallen2]

Interesting article, Though I didnt rate their app much, Im amazed its giving them a salery, I think they was expecting to retire of it.

[thunderbird]

This article is good resource.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/feb/10/gameculture-apple

[Business Bear]

Hey one thing that hit me after I paid the hundred bucks...  you might just be able to jail break your iphone/ipod and experiment before you drop the cash.  If you can spare it, it's worth it, but it might be possible to side-step the membership if you're not sure how serious you are and want to try out some stuff first.

Of course you'll have to join the developer program before you actually release anything on the app store.  And I haven't actually done this myself, but it should be possible.

I was accepted within a week I think.

[jack2009]

How easy is it to make iPhone apps? The cheapest iPhone developer program is $99 but I don't want to invest in that if making iPhone apps is extremely difficult and requires advanced programming/code knowledge. Any advice? thanks
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[Business Bear]

I haven't tried myself, but I think Unity may be the easiest route into iPhone game development at the moment.  I would try writing a few games in either Unity (or C++/OpenGL) and if you make something that you think would do well, THEN sign up for the developer's program.

Of course it depends what you'd like to make, but iPhone game development is pretty much the same as PC game development.

[moopf]

I joined the iPhone dev program back in August last year (subsequently released a puzzler). It didn't take a long time to get accepted, a few weeks maybe, and this was applying as an individual. If you apply as a company, the process seems much longer from what I've heard.

As for how easy it is, when I developed my puzzler there weren't really any things like Unity or iTorque available yet (I mean, they were available but there was no iPhone publishing for them), so I learnt Objective-C (I have plenty of previously programming experience) and built as I learnt. I have to say it's actually a really elegant language and if I had cause to I wouldn't be adverse to developing again for either the Mac/iPhone with Objective-C. You tend to mix in a lot of C and C++ but overall it's nicely structured and the libraries provided are fairly well documented by Apple and provide some fairly high level functionality quickly and easily.

There's also a nice library now called Cocos2d (http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/) for 2D game development which I've played with a bit (didn't actually use it for my puzzler, again it wasn't really in any state to use it when I was developing) and seems very useful, so that might be worth investigating as well.

Hope that helps.

[ASSDADS]

Moopf, out of curiosity, which puzzle game on the app store is yours? You can PM it, if you feel strange about promoting it here. Just interested in seeing first projects for this platform (aside from the $800,000 wonder iShoot) as I think about getting involved myself.