Crash Course In iPhone Development w/SDK

Crash Course In iPhone Development w/SDK

Written By Mike on Mar. 7, 2008.

I've been sitting in my bed for the past two hours absorbing all that I can about the new iPhone SDK and I've compiled a list of things to read/skim/understand while you wait for the 2GB+ SDK to download...

Cocoa Fundamentals Guide - Goes over the ideas of developing with Cocoa, the layers of the OS you'll be working with, and OOP concepts within Cocoa. More high-level, not really a syntax/programming reference.
iPhone OS Programming Guide - Discusses the differences between UIKit on iPhone vs. AppKit in Mac OS X, walks you through starting a new iPhone application, what the various views are, how to link things together, and how to work with the various technologies & APIs that Apple provides for iPhone development. I'm about 30% of the way through this one.
Beginner's Guide To Objective-C - If you're freaked out by all the brackets and parenthesis in Objective-C code like I am, you need to read this to get your bearings. What a great find.
PyObjC Tutorial For Developing Cocoa Apps w/Python - I won't be using Python to write my apps, but since Python syntax more closely resembles languages like PHP & Perl, it was a great way to put Objective-C syntax into my PHP syntax-oriented head in order to make sense of it all. Python syntax is so simple that this would be a good read for anyone, regardless of if you're coming from JavaScript, Java, PHP, or any other language, plus it's from Apple.

Now go do some homework!

thame

Written Mar. 7, 2008 / Report /

Nice, I downloaded the kit but didn't know quite what to do with it. This'll be fun to read.

RightOn

Written Mar. 7, 2008 / Report /

I sure wish I had the know how to program, I could probably come up with some good ideas.

ryanarrowsmith

Written Mar. 7, 2008 / Report /

I downloaded the kit last night. I'm going to try and build a native app that interfaces with Chyrp or Tumblr. I will probably just give up when someone else beats me to the punch though. :)

RightOn

Written Mar. 7, 2008 / Report /

All I want is a good "Quicken" style app that can keep track of my bank account, CandyBar, and good games.

drjuice

Written Mar. 14, 2008 / Report /

All I want is a good "Quicken" style app that can keep track of my bank account, CandyBar, and good games.

You should check out the newest version of iBank (version 3). It doesn't seem like it's quite as powerful as Quicken (though I've never used Quicken), but it's pretty easy to set up and use, and if all you're doing is tracking personal finances and maybe some investments it does the job. New in v3 is the ability to direct download from certain banks that support the right protocol. My local bank doesn't, but it can download from my Fidelity 401(k) account fine.

The coolest feature for me, though, is the ability to sync with .Mac and the iPhone/iPod Touch. If you're a .Mac member, there's a small package of some HTML and CSS files that you drop into the root of your iDisk. Then, sync up iBank and point your MobileSafari at http://idisk.mac.com/yourusername/iBank/index.html and viola! you can add transactions on the fly and sync up back at home.

With the SDK out, I wonder if they'll be able to remove the requirement for .Mac, though that would require either (a) running some kind of "iBank server" on your machine or (b)the ability for 3rd party apps to sync up to the desktop through or outside of iTunes.