The technologies that we use to write applications for our end users are changing at a frightening pace! Over the past few years the title of my blog has changed from "Adventures in WPF" to "Adventures in .NET", and more recently to the very generic "Adventures in Technology". The latest change reflects the fact that I now divide my time between an ever increasing range of technologies spanning XAML-technologies, JavaScript (Knockout, jQuery Mobile, GWT) and recently I have added iOS to the mix!

Around one year ago in a blog post about the decline in Silverlight adoption I stated that; "Now, more than ever, is a time for developers to diversify and learn new skills." - I have certainly been taking heed of my own advice. There is no disputing the fact that iOS is, in terms of sales, the leader in the tablet market, and in terms of popularity, the leader in the smartphone market also. My first dabble in the iOS world involved using Xamarin's MonoTouch product - which allows you to write .NET code for iOS. But more recently I have rolled up my sleeves and given 'native' development a go.

Last week my first iOS development tutorials were published on Ray Wenderlich's site, a three part series describing the development of a gesture-driven to-do list application. Ray Wenderlich's site provides free tutorials for iOS developers, written by a team of bloggers, and fine tuned by a team of expert editors.

Followers of my blog might have noticed that I have already written about the development of a similar application for Windows Phone.

So, what is iOS development like?

Compared to Windows Phone development, iOS feels a more low level. Objective-C is nowhere near as expressive as C#, and performing the same tasks often requires more code in the iOS world. However, the more low-level nature of iOS development is to its advantage. Whilst I have struggled with performance on Windows Phone, especially when trying to mimic the look-and-feel of the built-in applications, with iOS this is not the case. As a result of this, the third-party iOS applications feel just as slick as the first-party apps that ship with the OS.

You'll certainly be seeing more iOS development from me in the future!