Lately I’ve been working on a new project, an hourly rate calculator for the iPhone.  RateMate is a port of our ProfitWatch software to the iPhone.  I think calculating the proper hourly rate is so important to small business that I hope this app will bring the concept to a wider audience.

iPhone development has turned out to be a real blast — very solid tools with Xcode and Interface Builder, coupled with a solid iPhone emulator, made the only challenge the learning of the Cocoa environment.

<Nerd Moment>
Cocoa is a development environment wrapped around Objective-C, which is a fascinating addition to the C programming language. Objective-C operates based on objects and messages, much like Smalltalk, and practically abandons any procedural thinking. I remember moving from being a Basic, Pascal, &  C Programmer to programming in C++, Object Pascal, and learning object orientation in those last two.

The difference between procedural programming and object programming is just huge. Moving to Objective-C almost felt like that again, and I had to rewire my brain to think purely in terms of objects.
</Nerd Moment>

For those of you who are programmers and are interested in learning new platforms, I have to say the tools provided for the iPhone are stellar and lack only in tutorial based documentation.  That I ended up getting from the book iPhone SDK Development by Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson.

Available through the Pragmatic Programmers website, this will give you the rest of what you need to get started with iPhone development.

RateMate is currently undergoing the App Store review process and I will post again when it is released.