TimesToCome Mobile

It has been painful learning to write programs for the iPhone. My C++ is shamefully rusty and I’ve done everything from a command line for years. So I have to learn ObjC and how to develop code in XCode.

The first thing you must do is sign up for the iPhone Developer Program. There is a free program that will get you the developer kit, manuals, and source code. Pay $99 and you can get the certificates that will let you load code onto your phone for testing or put it up on the iTunes store.

Once you’ve signed up you’ll need to download and install the developer kit onto your computer.

If you plan to sell applications on the App store fill out your bank and tax information since it takes a long time for the contract information to get approved. ( iPhone Dev Center -> Program Portal -> Distribution -> App Store -> Learn more -> Go to iTunes Connect -> Contracts, Tax & Banking Information )

Then download all the sample code, you use it often.

(* Note: you must sign up for the developer program to download these manuals. )

The pdf manuals you’ll find most useful for getting started in ObjC and XCode are:
iPhone OS Programming Guide
ObjC

Then move onto both of these pdfs which walk you through simple projects:
ObjCTutorial.pdf
iPhone101.pdf

The icodeblog has several code examples and it walks you through in very tiny steps. I’ve found it to be a great help when I get stuck on something.

Another very useful blog with well explained examples and source code is MikeTeo.

iPhone Application Programming ( Stanford online course

I have ‘Programming in Objective-C (Developer’s Library)‘, ‘Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition)‘ and ‘iPhone Open Application Development: Write Native Objective-C Applications for the iPhone‘.

‘Programming in ObjC’ is a great place to start if you are new to ObjC. ‘Cocoa Programming for Mac’ is good for learning Cocoa if you know ObjC but it is all for desktop application, not iPhone applications.

The ‘iPhone Open Application Development’ book looks to have some interesting information, but I haven’t found it to be very useful yet. Several books are supposed to be released this fall, but that’s still many months off.

If you have written code for cell phones before you’ll find much of the interface stuff is familiar.  It’s just a matter of getting the hang of the Apple drag and drop GUI.

If you want to write games you’ll want to brush up on or learn OpenGL and get the basics of that down. For a really cool example of 3d graphics on the iPhone check out iHologram

With GPS, a large screen, and internet access there is so much this phone will be capable of doing. There are things we won’t be able to live with out a year from now that are just sparkles in coders brains at the moment. Don’t wait for next falls batch of books.

If you are totally new to programming you’ll want to download the free pdf or buy Thinking in C++: Introduction to Standard C++, Volume One (2nd Edition) and dig into code get your basic stuff down first.

Also see Miklos Fazekas’s Blog entry on Debugging iPhone provision profiles/certificates. It was a big help to me.