iPhone Application developement

Recently our division has started getting a lot of queries about our competency on iPhone. And I must say..It was close to nil. That's when we decided we need to get our hands dirty. And here I'm writing a small blog on how to go about with your application development for the 'Jesus Phone' or rather I would say...My experiences.

First thing..I never laid my hands on a Mac machine (except when I visit some Apple showrooms for buying iPod, where I have tried to quench my curiosity on this 'ultimate' machine). So the first thing was to get a Mac machine (We tried to see if we can have the iPhone SDK running in a windows platform..No luck..I think Apple guys hate Microsoft :-) ). At last we zeroed upon a mac mini, which will keep your credit card bill also to a mini. At least that's the cheapest Mac that we could get with the Configuration that was needed for running iPhone SDK.

Download iPhone SDK from here

The pre conditions are 1) you need to be a Registered iPhone developer. It's free(but not enrolling in the iPhone Developer program. More on that later)

2) Technical requirement. Intel based Mac running Mac OS X Leopard

There are ways to run the iPhone SDK in a Power PC based Mac too... But that involves a lot of hacking and cracking. If you are new to Apple environment, get that Intel based machine..you will have more hairs intact in your head.

A Mac Mini is a small CPU box with all the ports that usually come with a PC box. You can connect your existing PC peripherals without an issue.(Heard that Apple is stopping mac mini production, so rush to that Apple store if you want one)

Here is a picture



The Mini that I got had MacOSX 10.3. I downloaded the Phone SDK dmg file and tried to run it , only to find out that you need Mac OSX 10.5.5. So I did a software update and got it upgraded to 10.5.5 (Well during all these I managed to 'Crash' the mac. Yeah you heard it right...Atleast now I know windows in not alone in this aspect)

The iPhone SDK will contain XCode 3.0 (the development environment for Mac..something similar to Visual Studio in windows), Interface builder (as the name suggest), Instruments (For performance test) and the iPhone Simulator.

Once you are done with the SDK installation, it will be good if you go through the Documentation provided by Apple for iPhone. Its good enough to get you started.

What you will find is that, you need to get used to working with XCode, IB and Objective-C (the programming language in Mac). A good read on Cocoa Touch API and frameworks will also help.

I also found a blog, iCodeBlog , which was quite helpful for someone new to Mac and iPhone. Just go through the tutorials.

The NDA that Apple had on for iPhone had stopped a lot of Apple developers from discussing stuff on iPhone application development. Now that, this NDA is cleared, there are a lot more details coming out. These two books seems to be the most popular

The iPhone Developer's Cookbook - by Erica Sadun

Professional iPhone and iPod touch Programming - by Richard Wagner

As I said. i just got it rolling. Next I'll post about my first interaction with XCode, IB and the iPhone Simulator. There a few teammates who are working on other platforms like Blackberry and Symbian. I'll try to add those too in my posts.