Serious+problems+with+Objective-C

It has been some weeks since the last entry about programming and learning Objective-C, since that time we have looked at a number of resources, the Lynda videos on iPhone application development, wiki's, blogs, YouTube and an excellent book called iPhone Application Development by Neal Goldstein.

 While we have figured out quite a bit we got stuck in the middle ground again.

 We found that:
 * the Apple documentation is written for people with prior software development experience, they are aimed at the higher end of the 'market'. The documentation is difficult to understand as there are no simple examples of code use and the explanations seem to require an understanding that is beyond an entry level developer. While there are code examples that can be downloaded they are complete applications and it is necessary to interpret, in some circumstances, complete applications of code just to find what you are looking for.
 * while there are many examples on the Internet available they are either too basic and don't explain anymore than we already understand or have found the examples are well beyond our ability to really understand what is going on so we can't then interpret the example and use in our own ways.
 * while we were programming some basic applications but not really understanding exactly why that particular piece of code was needed and it was taking a long time to find information we could use to help us interpret those bits of code.

 We were learning and making headway, in the end, but we were getting there slowly. We needed to review our project goals. Was learning Objective-C the only way to create an iPhone application, was there another way that would make it easier for us and for others to create an iPhone App.

 One of our project goals was that it should be as easy as possible to learn how to create an iPhone app. Learning Objective-C, for the reasons listed above, was proving to not be easy.

 We started to look into alternatives to the iPhone SDK and Objective-C.