I am bored with my day job (under challenged and no creative work), and recently got interested in iOS app development. I am from cs background and 3 years of experience in programming (not good at design). Can some experienced developers/freelancers throw advice for me as well job opportunities in this area?
In the contracting game, there are unfortunately a large number of people who don't have a good appreciation of your costs, much more so than web dev or other types of contracting. Sifting through the haystack to find the good gigs is a royal pain.
As for the work itself, it is definitely low-level development, and when done right, it is fun & rewarding. You get different kinds of performance problems than you would get with web dev, which is fun, and the release cycles cause you to come up with some interesting solutions for tracking down and fixing issues. When you're fixing bugs in that codebase from India, on the other hand, because they wrote 20 KLOC in a single file and not a lick of memory management in the lot, you start to ponder your sanity.
Step 2) Type in "ios developer" in the jobs section.
Step 3) Repeat process on variety of jobs sites/locations/keywords until curiosity satisfied.
if you dont know Obj-C and have some js knowledge then you can get up to speed very quickly using titanium appacelerator
Uses js to do most things, so as a stopgap until you have fully learnt Obj-C this might be a good gentle introduction to iPhone dev. It also produces Android code (with some massaging).