Congratulations on the good prospects (and the choice to give it a try).
Oddly enough, I signed up as an Apple developer this week and I'm reading through the iOS docs, while waiting for a Snow Leopard update disk for the company's old Mac-mini (we'll worry about getting an actual iPad2 later). Now that the iPad2 is out, it's attracting even more attention from the gaming point of view since its hardware is quite good (3X faster than nVidia Tegra2 - we tried the Xoom and Android coding last month) and it does vertex and pixel shaders (OpenGL ES 2.0). So we have a chance of getting our PC / console engine working on it, though the 512MB of RAM is a bit worrisome, but at least it's the same as modern game consoles.
Ah well, always something new and interesting in the games business (Kinect was last fall's mind stretcher). There's better pay elsewhere, but nothing as intriguing.
i happen to have an ipad 2 myself. i didn't plan to get one, and i still don't think it serves much of a purpose in my life. but i needed a second, physical device for game center testing. i could have bought an ipod touch, but apart from testing, it would have been money down a rathole. i could at least see myself using an ipad a little bit for other things. a lot of my game players are on ipad, and it's nice to be able to evaluate other people's ipad apps.
having said that, don't underestimate the value of the ipad simulator you get with xcode. i used it exclusively to write the first ipad version of my card game. i didn't have a choice: if you wanted your ipad app to be in the app store on day one, you had to use the simulator, because the ipad was not yet available to purchase. if you're careful and don't take any sloppy shortcuts, the simulator can bear most of the weight of development and testing. the ipad version of my game was in the store for many months before i ever laid a hand on a physical ipad, and amazingly, it worked
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Thanks for the tip - Simulator useful. Though likely not for the OpenGL ES side of things (mentioned in the documents, perhaps it doesn't do shaders). Still, we've got a PC version of OpenGL ES to work on the 3D graphics side of the code and the simulator to get a start on the glue logic, and a enchanting old demo we can use as a testbed.
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Oddly enough, I signed up as an Apple developer this week and I'm reading through the iOS docs, while waiting for a Snow Leopard update disk for the company's old Mac-mini (we'll worry about getting an actual iPad2 later). Now that the iPad2 is out, it's attracting even more attention from the gaming point of view since its hardware is quite good (3X faster than nVidia Tegra2 - we tried the Xoom and Android coding last month) and it does vertex and pixel shaders (OpenGL ES 2.0). So we have a chance of getting our PC / console engine working on it, though the 512MB of RAM is a bit worrisome, but at least it's the same as modern game consoles.
Ah well, always something new and interesting in the games business (Kinect was last fall's mind stretcher). There's better pay elsewhere, but nothing as intriguing.
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having said that, don't underestimate the value of the ipad simulator you get with xcode. i used it exclusively to write the first ipad version of my card game. i didn't have a choice: if you wanted your ipad app to be in the app store on day one, you had to use the simulator, because the ipad was not yet available to purchase. if you're careful and don't take any sloppy shortcuts, the simulator can bear most of the weight of development and testing. the ipad version of my game was in the store for many months before i ever laid a hand on a physical ipad, and amazingly, it worked ( ... )
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