#ifdef

I’ve been seriously drinking from the firehose for the past few months, but I’m up to take a few breaths and commit to posting more about what I’m up to.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some really talented guys and clients doing iPhone and Rails app development. Objective-C was pretty easy to pickup. I call it a mashup of C and Smalltalk. Combine that with Cocoa Touch and you have a really nice development environment for the iPhone. The abstractions are high level enough that you don’t really have to be a mobile or embedded developer to get into it. Just take care to manage memory allocations and you’ll be fine.

Ryan, Josh and James over at YFactorial have done an awesome job with ObjectiveResource. It really makes it easy to quickly bring up applications with iPhone clients and Rails backends. Core Data is probably a fine library, but if you’re communicating with a Rails app, ObjectiveResource is a great way to serialize data without impacting the server development much.

The Ruby and Rails communities are just chock full of brilliant folks and the quality of teaching and training materials is awesome. It makes it a really exciting place to be working right now. I’m having about as much fun with the productivity hacks as I am with the platform itself. That’s been a really nice refresh.

There are a few product releases in the queue for 2009, so I’ll be busy. I hope you’re having as much fun as I am. I really mean that!