Making iApps

There was a decent article about a year ago in the Guardian about programing for the iPhone:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/feb/10/gameculture-a...

You'll need to know, or be willing to learn, C. Overall, it seems very do-able if you have the time to learn it, or already know something of object-oriented programing. There are a lot of helpful walkthroughs at the iPhone dev site, here:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/

And it looks like they've released a beta iPad SDK, too.

The only cost, assuming you already have a Mac, is $99 -- this registers you and allows you to sell your app on the store. You don't have to do this until you're ready to distribute, though, as anyone with a free Apple ID can download and install the SDK.

So all in all, not too bad, but consider that, much like board games, the app store is a hits-driven marketplace where nearly all of the sales are generated by a few market leaders, and the rest make almost nothing. On the other hand, the hits are indeed lucrative. And there's no networking with industry bigwigs at expensive and noisy conventions, either.