Appletell

Have you ever wondered what everyone on the Windows world does if they want to develop an application for the iPhone?

I’ve been asking myself this question more and more now that I see the growing excitement, and the business possibilities surrounding the iPhone development efforts. If Microsoft has more than 80% of the OS home and office market, it means a lot of potential developers are being left out the party.

As far as I know, there’s no solution for that problem yet, at least not one as elegant as the iPhone SDK for the Mac, with all its fancy tools. Nevertheless, the idea behind this article is not to propose a solution for Windows developers, but rather to focus on just one element of the application development process: the design.

Any group of professionals dedicated to software development know that one vital part of the whole process of creating an application is the design itself. All the effort invested at this stage will be rewarded at the end, when making changes and adding new features for an application will take less time, and, therefore, cost less money.

iRise is, according to them, the market leading supplier of visualization software for business applications. This company believes (and I couldn’t agree more) that the visualization process is the key to a positive and effective software development process. iRise announced a few months ago the availability of the iRise Simulation Template for the iPhone.

This template gives you a chance to look at and feel the behavior of any future iPhone application by making it possible to simulate all of the iPhone’s icons, menus, buttons and most of the user actions.

OneSpring, an iRise partner, offers a group of solutions for prototyping business applications, and today we’ll get to know a little bit better a very interesting one: iPhone SimDK.

The iPhone SimDK, as OneSpring describes it, is:

… a complete toolkit for the design of custom iPhone applications inside of iRise. It offers a template guide that matches the form of the iPhone to help ensure designs can be accurately reproduced with the Apple SDK. The OneSpring iPhone SimDK for iRise toolkit includes:

• iPhone iRise iDoc template with guides
• Menu icons
• Template to create your own application icon
• Slider and button action behaviors
• Multi-touch interface actions

This tool allows anyone in the Windows world to design and test high-fidelity prototypes of iPhone applications without a single line of Objective-C in them.  The creator of the toolkit affirms that in order to assure accuracy and authenticity, the iPhone SimDK was created using the iPhone SDK provided by Apple.

The great potential of this advanced tool is that you could go through the process of designing and distributing a close-to-reality model of an iPhone application to the management crew of your company, corporate clients, customers and developers without having to even get around a Mac, allowing your Windows (and iRise) based company to somehow get started with the development of iPhone applications right away, with no dramatic increase of hardware and software investment.

If your company specializes in software engineering, analysis and design of software applications, being mainly Windows based is no longer an excuse for staying out of the current and increasingly trend of developing for the most advanced mobile platform of today: the iPhone.

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