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Some thoughts about iPhone projects
Making an iPhone app. can be quite a challenge. Initially learning the iOS SDK will take time; it can be quite mysterious at first. It does get quicker and quicker as time goes on. I have used many parts of the SDK now and there are few areas that I have I not worked with.
What I have experienced with many recent projects is that technical details are implied by the design. A client does not necessarily perceive what is difficult. It is important to be realistic about how long certain features will take to implement. As well, there are things to consider like memory use and the way content feeds are handled. On a very recent project, there was an XML feed and also images in the data. A simple caching system was implemented to handle the image downloads. More time should have been available to tune this feature. The visual design which the client signs off on does not account for such "under the hood" activities. And these are very difficult item for a client to acknowledge. They cannot see the code. One needs to communicate the essence of the task. There is the potential blinding of the client with science. I personally try to avoid that. I have seen many developers go into technical detail at a meeting and no one really knew what the developer was saying aside from other developers.