> For most software, even small iPhone apps, by far the biggest > cost is going to be the time spent by the developers
You are thinking of the iPhone developer community as a formal software development house. But, as someone else pointed out, the majority of iPhone app developers are small developers. Possibly one man shops. And "shop" could be stretching a point. Bedroom/hobby coders in many cases I should think. "Time" for such people is essentially free. Even if you or I ascribe some notional value to their time, it is not a factor that shows up on their bottom line, at least not when they are getting started. A Delphi license (and subsequent upgrades or SA renewals) may not seem like much when it's your boss or the accounts department placing the order, or when you have an established license revenue stream, but when it is coming out of your own pocket, after taxes, to provide a tool with which you intend to build something that may or may not be successful (and which you may never even finish) it's an entirely different proposition. > If one tool is 20-30% more productive then that is likely to > easily make up that cost and more. The extent to which tools now provide different levels of productivity is difficult to measure I think, and is often confused with "feature lists". The concept of the IDE was the single biggest contribution to productivity in the last 20 years of this industry. The bells and whistles shoe-horned into the IDE's (and frameworks) since contribute less to productivity in my view than the diligence, skills and experience of the developer at the keyboard. Taking twice as long to create high quality code will be repaid scores and possibly hundreds of times over in the years of maintenance of that code that follows. Tools the eliminate or reduce the time, or the opportunity, to think and/or which reward coding in haste and maintaining at leisure (looking at you, automated refactoring tools) are regarded as "productivity" tools, when ime they are anything but. They are positively *counter*-productive (only up to a point, of course - I do not advocate that we return to punching out code on card!! Far from it). But we should also remember that the free alternatives don't just mean the seemingly sub-par Apple tools, but as someone else pointed out, also Visual Studio C# Express + MonoTouch. _______________________________________________ NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi mailing list Post: delphi@delphi.org.nz Admin: http://delphi.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi Unsubscribe: send an email to delphi-requ...@delphi.org.nz with Subject: unsubscribe
