Programming the iPhone
I don’t write software at work anymore, although I used to be a developer years back, but I still enjoy writing software at home for my own uses. My main area of interest at the moment is Java and writing 2D games in it. I’ve got a couple of projects on the go which I will post about later.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m looking forward to the iPhone 3G coming out, and also being able to write native apps in it. I downloaded the iPhone SDK a month back and have been playing with it a little since.
I’ve never really done my C programming but as it has similarities to Java, I’ve been able to pick it up as I’ve gone along. Objective-C is the C derivative being used by Apple on their desktop OS X platform and iPhone. The IDE I have been using for this is XCode which has been created by Apple and is their IDE internally for writing OS X etc. It was a bit of a shock to start off with as I’m used to Eclipse for my Java projects, but I’m getting used to it. I’m also starting to love Interface Builder which comes with XCode. This lets you design GUIs graphically and then wire the different elements to the code behind.
This is the MVC pattern for developing GUIs and it works very well. It took a little getting used to, but I bought the 3rd edition of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS. This is a great book, covers enough about Objective-C to help a noob like me with it and also shows how something in Java could be done in Objective-C and Cocoa…perfect.
For developing on the iPhone you use the very same IDE and interface builder, albeit a new Beta version which you can download that includes the iPhone items and also a very nice iPhone Simulator. This is a great tool for testing your apps and also support multi touch through the mouse, so there is not much you can’t do on it.
All in all I’m excited about getting the iPhone and writing software for it. With the Apple Apps Store also being launched giving us all a platform from which to make the software available, I think it could be interesting times ahead. Here’s to 11th July.
Mike
