Apple iPhone Development - introduction and resources

Apple iPhone Development:

So, it seems like everyone's doing it these days, but that's no excuse for me not to join in is it?...

Objective-C you say, isn't that a bit like Smalltalk?
xCode, what's that exactly?
Cocoa, Nibs? what the?!?

Well there's much to learn, but most of it seems reasonably straightforward. The Apple documentation is good, there are videos to watch and tutorials, most of these resources can be found via the Apple iPhone dev center on the Apple website. From what I've gathered so far, its quite far removed from previous mobile development I've done, such as J2ME and .NET CF.

Armed with a new Apple Mac I'm making some notes as I venture into the unknown.

Firstly, here are a bunch of useful resources:

iPhone Dev center:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/

iPhone Developer Program:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/

iPhone SDK:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/download.action?path=/iphone/iphone_sdk_for_iphone_os_2.2.1__9m2621a__final/iphone_sdk_for_iphone_os_2.2.19m2621afinal.dmg


Objective-C:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/ObjC.pdf

Objective-C is an object orientated version of the C language. Specifically for the iPhone, Objective-C 2.0 is used.

Objective-C has been influenced by Smalltalk, yes that's the OO language with all the [] in it.

iPhone development guide:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Xcode/Conceptual/iphone_development/iPhone_Development.pdf

First iPhone application:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhone101/iPhone101.pdf

The current latest version of the iPhone OS and iPhone SDK is 2.2.1 (whilst at the time of writing this 3.0 is in beta preview).

The next version, 3.0 is to be officially launched soon, the SDK should be available before the official OS release, in theory. What's in it, what's different I don't know yet, but hopefully it will be largly compatible with the current version, whilst adding some interesting new features into the mix. Rumoured are things like the much awaited support for copy, cut and paste for example.


HTTP and XML, web services:
Interested in hooking up an iPhone application with some web services, some means to make an HTTP request and parse XML is needed, here are a couple of resources on this:


Simple solution using some utility code:

http://blog.atrexis.com/index.cfm/2008/7/28/iPhone--Parse-XML-to-custom-objects

A more advanced solution:

http://code.google.com/p/touchcode/wiki/TouchXML


Useful article on RESTful clients:

http://developer.apple.com/safari/articles/creatingrestfulclients.html


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