Making an iPhone app - Part 1 - Prepare

Hi Readers,

In a nice little series I'm gonna walk you though the raw basics of an iPhone app creation.

This part is about preparing yourself for development. Before you do anything you have to know Objective C. If you don't know it yet, better to read some materials:

• Learn Objective-C on the Mac (book)
• Introduction to The Objective-C Programming Language (official Apple introduction)
• Learn Objective-C on Cocoa dev Central

You have to know the basics of the language. Couple of keywords that you really have to take attention: messaging, objects, properties and categories, memory management, delegation.

In the meantime you need Xcode, the all-in-one developer environment from also Apple. For this you need an Apple ID account, but for the simple download now you can get it for free.

[For testing apps on the iPhone device or submitting to the AppStore you need an official iOS developer account, but I want to talk about it in a following part.]

What you have to is going through one of the aforementioned docs (preferably each) and trying out each language features in Xcode. You can even start with a simple console application. NSLog(@"I'm here!") can give you all the feedback you need for the first times.

Some really good sources to have a better insight:

• Ray Wenderlich's blog
• StackOwerflow's well rated Objective-C threads
• Developing Apps for iOS - Stanford University

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In the next part:

iOS basic concept and planning of the application.

Night,

Peter