Sorry, but if you went through all the steps required to actually build and ship a real application on a normal platform (Mac/Win), it'd probably seem a lot more complex, but just not in a bureaucratic way.
(He said, having just gone through all this pain himself. Our app is still in review, but if you're interested, there's a pre-release website for it: http://grafly.com. It's a 2d/3d equation graph explorer with some pretty interesting technology hidden inside. (I didn't write that part. ;-))
There's some nonsense here, yes, but it's just part of the ecosystem.
It might actually consume 2-3 days of your life; if you're serious about making apps for the iPhone, that's really not a barrier.
Yes, the 2d/3d isosurface incremental exploration machinery was all written (exceedingly tight C++) by my whiz-kid development partner.
The challenge is to take an arbitrary equation in a given viewport (2d or 3d cube), find all the satisfying points, and build a displayable mesh (output as OpenGL triangles).
Then, as the user zooms in and out, pans around, etc., the challenge is to rebuild the new mesh intelligently, re-using what you computed so far, including garbage-collecting all the old mesh values, all the while increasing or reducing the mesh density for the given zoom level.
It's a really hard problem he solved extremely well.
(He said, having just gone through all this pain himself. Our app is still in review, but if you're interested, there's a pre-release website for it: http://grafly.com. It's a 2d/3d equation graph explorer with some pretty interesting technology hidden inside. (I didn't write that part. ;-))
There's some nonsense here, yes, but it's just part of the ecosystem.
It might actually consume 2-3 days of your life; if you're serious about making apps for the iPhone, that's really not a barrier.
Maybe it keeps out the whiners. ;-)