Appendix C. Alternatives to Objective-C
Steve Jobs, one of the original founders of Apple Inc., has overseen a number of innovations and exciting products in the computer industry since Apple was founded in 1976.
Two of the most recent of these are undoubtedly the iPhone and iPad. There’s no denying that the iPhone has made an impact on the smartphone marketplace. Software developers, device manufacturers, and telecommunication carriers can attribute to the iPhone’s presence at least some kind of impact on or change in their industries, whether it’s an increased interest in innovative and visually appealing UIs or the increased use of cellular data services and downloadable content.
If the iPhone is your first foray into a platform developed by Apple, the required development tools and languages are likely to feel foreign and perhaps even esoteric or antiquated compared to your current platform because of their rather different origins.
Much as the iPhone hardware can trace its roots to a long line of prior iPod devices, Objective-C and Cocoa Touch can follow their long lineage and history back more than 25 years. The iPhone is as much a culmination and refinement of existing technologies as it is a breakthrough design.
In this appendix we discuss some of the alternatives to developing iOS applications in Objective-C, but first, it’s important to understand the origins of Objective-C.