Kim mentions the use of free audio production software, such as Audacity, as substitutes for commercial offerings. While an Audacity user is more than welcome to dive into the code base and make needed improvements, not every user has the time and/or ability to do such. In my estimation, neither Audacity 1.3.7 nor Audacity 1.2.6 are stable enough to be considered "professional-quality" software. I am not trying to insult the developers and their abilities -- they have a complex project on their hands. But Audacity's graphical interface has serious and repeatable bugs; Audacity's sound export facilities reliably adds spurious noise to sound. I admire Kim's decision to use Ubuntu as an audio workstation, but I don't think Kim has been forthcoming about sacrifices in software quality that a user must make to do so. Kim can easily translate most audio programming done in Max/MSP (the commercial environment he has worked with extensively) to the public domain environment "pd" -- but as an experienced user of both systems there are more functionality loses than gains moving from the commercial Max/MSP/Jitter environment to pd (Pure Data).
If the cost of an Apple system and the higher cost of outfitting it with professional quality audio production and performance software are bankrupting a musician, then I can see the logic of using an Ubuntu system at this time. Otherwise, I still believe the adage "you get what you pay for" applies. However, I believe with effort from open source audio developers an Ubuntu audio workstation with both cost and quality advantages is more than possible. The bugs I am seeing in Audacity today remind me of the bugs I saw in the comparable commercial application "Peak" ten years ago.
You're practically self-parodying here...
You can target the iPod touch as well as the iPhone, and can develop on the iPod touch as well as the iPhone ($220 development platforms with no per-month cost).
Excluding, of course, the per-month AT&T contract.
Ummm, there isn't a contract for the iPod touch. You can pay $220 for the iPod touch and develop for the iPhone without any monthly contract as long as your application doesn't require carrier networking. One of two iPhones that I develop for is a 1st gen without a sim and without a contract. They sometimes can be picked up cheaply used at this point. It needs to be jailbroken, but Apple still lets me develop on it.
And apple takes only a 30% cut of revenue, in exchange for a nice distribution mechanism.
"Only" 30%? And they can pull the plug on your app any time they want.
All you've managed to do so far is to show that it could work, not why it's better than anything else.
And Apple has pulled how many plugs now out of close to ten thousand? I can count them on my hands. More than 5 less than 10. Of those pulled only 2 of them could be proudly shown to the developer's mother. And several of the pulled apps could be created in less than 1 hour of work.
The iPhone is a fantastic platform for networking development. It has several excellent network APIs available at its disposal. I went with BSD for my networking code -- byzantine but solid and extraordinarily well-documented. Windows Mobile as an alternative? I would not even ping
Sure Android is a good platform for network development too... but if you want to sell your work, have a more elegant, easier to code user interface environment, and hundreds of really fun apps to play with, I would go with the iPhone.
BTW, There is nothing more galvanizing for an iPhone developer than getting paid -- first checks (yes plural from several regions of our planet) came in today. =)
"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android