How much of a role did the fact that there was hardly any other public information on iOS programming out there play?
Could you start an iOS blog today and realistically hope for a similar outcome, or are there so many iOS blogs that it would it get lost in the noise, and it would be better to pick some newer, less-published technology?
Github is the new iOS blog. Make good libraries, get them trending, and go from there. I've had some amazing traction on one of my iOS/OSX libraries: https://github.com/bennyguitar/Colours - it's been trending for about 2 weeks straight now, and many many times in the past year. I get random emails all of the time from recruiters and people wanting me to do iOS contract work. The New York Times flew me up for an interview after I open-sourced this HN reader I made: https://github.com/bennyguitar/News-YC---iPhone. Of course, I marketed it fairly well on here through a Show HN and then on Reddit to get more people looking at it (there's not a whole lot of full apps on Github, mostly libraries).
I believe that it played a huge role. Although, I feel that you could still start a successful iOS blog today, you would have to bust your butt to even come close to sites like http://www.raywenderlich.com. Believe me, I've tried on my blog a while ago, but it's extremely hard to keep up a relevant and popular iOS tutorial site, especially with how fast Apple is moving.
That's not to say that you can't grab a piece of that market. When I was blogging there were only a few thousand iOS developers, now there are hundreds of thousands. So there is more demand.
Could you start an iOS blog today and realistically hope for a similar outcome, or are there so many iOS blogs that it would it get lost in the noise, and it would be better to pick some newer, less-published technology?