alternatives+to+the+iPhone+SDK+and+Objective-C

We needed to review our project goals as it was proving to be to time consuming to learn, and difficult to find pertinent information on Objective-C. One of our goals was to make sure that we could show the easiest way of making an iPhone application as possible.

 During the life of the project we were finding information about how to make an iPhone application without using the iPhone Software Development Kit. Some of software that could be used looked as difficult as Apple's iPhone SDK and some looked a bit better.

 The one that we were most excited about was that Adobe Flash CS5 was going to be released with the ability to create iPhone applications, and indeed it has been released with this functionality. Though the Apple App Store initially accepted early test versions of applications made with Flash it now has a policy that says that any applications made with third party software will be denied access to the App Store with some exceptions. Unfortunately one of the exceptions was not Flash. There have been a lot of articles about this on the Internet a common search used is Apple V's Flash.

Update: Towards the end of the project we learned that Apple had changed it's policy about allowing apps constructed with third party software (which includes Flash) into the App Store. Adobe's share price jumped 11% over night with the news and they made a statement saying that they were pleased with the developments and were cautiously optimistic. We were very pleased with the news and are also cautiously optimistic about what we may learn in 2011.)

 What we were starting to realise was that our application would infact be very similar to a smallish website, it just needed to play sound, show images, display text and perhaps have links to video. We thought we could in fact make a website and that students would be able to access that using their iPhone, or any other internet enabled device, and that would be an easy solve to our problems. And in some cases this is an easy answer and quite workable for anyone.

 The only real problem that we had is that we also wanted the students to have access to this information if they weren't in an area where they could access the Internet, and, we did start out wanting to create an iPhone application and educational websites have been done. What's new, what would we have learnt?. So a website was scratched pretty quickly.

 This lead us to Phonegap.