I had the opportunity to attend Apple's World Wide Developer Conference this past June. I attended the conference to learn about and gain experience in iPhone development. Most of my time was spent in the iPhone Lab and iPhone development presentations and sessions. I thought most the presentations were informative and well presented and I came away with a lot.

My only complaint is that Apple would not talk about or even acknowledge the more complex areas of sample code in their presentations. It was obvious Apple was focusing on making iPhone development look very easy through and through. And compared to other mobile platforms it is easier. However I wish they had spent some time going into the more complex, non-apple abstracted code that actually takes some time and thought.

The development experience is a good one. The language (Objective C), iPhone SDK and the development tools are well done. Objective C is a powerful object oriented language and the iPhone SDK is well abstracted and easy to use. If you need access to the more low-level API's they are readily available. Interface Builder is spectacular and it puts other interface/view building applications to shame. Xcode is still way behind other IDEs but it is very usable nonetheless. Their performance and debugging tools are excellent. Even when your code is well formed and well tested you have the potential to have memory leaks, and their memory leak detection tool is great for that kind of problem.

From a professional development standpoint the platform is ready to go. A developer can test drive their code using OCMock and OCUnit. If you prefer a different testing platform I recommend looking into rbiphonetest.

I was able to successfully create an iPhone application using Atomic Object's Presenter First style of development. However, bootstrapping the application becomes problematic when the application uses a great deal of composition. It would be nice if a dependency injection framework existed and was available for iPhone development. However, it is possible to use Interface Builder to instantiate all of the singletons in the system and inject them, which could be an acceptable alternative.