Mac & iPhone Programming on the Rise

O’Reilly, a leading publisher of technical books, posted on Friday a State of the Computer Book Market report that points to an increase in sales of books relating to programming for the Mac and iPhone platforms.

The big success story among programming languages is Objective-C, which has grown from a small (low unit sales) language into a large (high units sales) language. iPhone and Mac development is fueling this growth.

This is not surprising to me. Mobile platforms like the iPhone and Blackberry (and maybe the Palm Pre) represent perhaps the greatest growth opportunity in application programming in the coming years. There is a growing trend towards working and communicating from anywhere, and the mobile technologies are now taking shape to support this. These are not just cell phones anymore — they’re mobile computers.

The big winners will be those companies that can execute well in a couple of key areas: (1) attract talented software developers to design and write applications, and (2) make it easy for customers to get those apps on their devices. As I mentioned in a previous post about mobile applications, Apple’s iTunes App Store has set the standard for this model. I expect that Research in Motion (RIM, the Blackberry maker) and Palm are focused heavily on building out their app stores now, but they have some catching up to do. With more than 1.5 billion downloads in its first year and over 100,000 software developers on board, Apple has serious momentum on its side.

Posted: July 26th, 2009
Filed under: Apple, Handheld, Mobile, Software Tags: , , | No Comments »

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