iPhone® Application Development For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 19. Ten Ways to Be a Happy Developer

In This Chapter

• How not to paint yourself into a corner

• Avoiding "There's no way to get there from here."

There are lots of things you know you're supposed to do, but you don't because you think they'll never catch up with you. (After all, not flossing won't cause you problems until your teeth fall out years from now, right?)

But in iPhone application development, those things catch up with you early and often, so I want to tell you about what I've learned to pay attention to from the very start in app development, as well as a few tips and tricks that lead to happy and healthy users.

It's Never Early Enough to Start Speaking a Foreign Language

With the world growing even flatter, and the iPhone available in more than 80 countries, the potential market for your app is considerably larger than just people who speak English. Localizing an application isn't difficult, just tedious. Some of it you can get away with doing late in the project, but when it comes to the strings you use in your application, you'd better build them right — and build them in from the start. The painless way: Use the NSLocalizedString macro (refer to Chapter 14) from the very start, and you'll still be a happy camper at the end.

Remember Memory

The iPhone OS does not store "changeable" memory (such as object data) on the disk to free up space and then read it back in later when needed. It also doesn't have garbage collection — which means there is a real potential for memory ...