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The Complete Guide for Starting iPhone and iOS Development

by withoutfriction on 3/11/11, 8:42 AM with 49 comments

  • by flyosity on 3/11/11, 12:58 PM

    I wrote Building iOS Apps From Scratch (http://designthencode.com/scratch) a 30-page guide for coders just learning Objective-C and Cocoa. Also, for coders looking to get into UI design, I wrote a 70-page guide as well: http://designthencode.com

    Hope it helps!

  • by stevederico on 3/11/11, 9:56 AM

    The Stanford iTunes U Courses should not be overlooked. They do a great job of taking you from crawling to running in no time. I enjoyed doing the homework too, it really increased my learning experience.

    Winter 2010- http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/iphone-application-devel...

    Spring 2009-http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/iphone-application-progr...

    Spring 2011 (Starting Soon)-http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/

  • by kingofspain on 3/11/11, 9:08 AM

    It should be noted you don't need a Mac. I've had 2 apps developed, submitted and approved from my makeshift vmware player running on W7. I know others who use Virtual Box. Never ran into any trouble other than wondering why all the keys behave differently!

    Yes, it's technically illegal but isn't that the best kind of illegal?

  • by marksu on 3/11/11, 10:16 AM

    Yes – programming is fun to hop into, but just a heads up: the most difficult process to learn and master is the marketing and promotion part of releasing an app.

    I feel that two blog posts linked in this article touches this subject in an interesting way: http://struct.ca/2010/the-story-so-far/ and http://blog.endloop.ca/blog/2010/08/12/100k-in-4-months-a-ni...

    That said, I would recommend Corona - http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/ - for anyone wanting to give iPhone app development a shot. Much easier and fun to jump into than objective-c, especially if you want to make games, and still pretty damn powerful!

  • by drpancake on 3/11/11, 10:32 AM

    Coming from Python, web development and Android, I found interface Builder to be the trickiest part of iOS to learn. The way it instantiates some of your classes requires you to build up a really odd mental model; I still don't fully understand it after a couple of months.

    You're welcome to do it all in code, but it seems to be discouraged by many.

  • by Breefield on 3/11/11, 9:02 AM

    This is great! I just started going through Programming in Objective-C 2.0, although I'm not new to programming at all, I am pretty new to C/Obj-C. Good to see it in this guide, reaffirms that it's a good starting place.

  • by xsltuser2010 on 3/11/11, 9:13 AM

    Is there a similar resource for Android ? I don't currently own one, but this kind of writeup would be helpful to estimate the effort to get into developing first things for it..

  • by bricestacey on 3/11/11, 12:55 PM

    This is just a bunch of links. Can anyone vouch for the author's credibility?

  • by philthy on 3/11/11, 5:58 PM

    For anyone who wants to fiddle with development and doesn't know any form of C, a company called Revolution Media makes a scripting tool called LiveCode. It is pretty easy to use but I'm not sure how advanced your apps can get.

  • by callmeed on 3/11/11, 6:10 PM

    I wouldn't call this a "complete guide" ... seems more like pre-reqs.

  • by mkramlich on 3/11/11, 7:37 PM

    The Apple docs already explain this pretty well. Not too hard. It's weird we live in a world of hand-holding comfort and plentiful documentation on almost everything and yet we still create more.

  • by guelo on 3/11/11, 12:37 PM

    The fine print for new iOS devs:

    If you succeed in overcoming all of the obstacles ahead of you and actually create a worthwhile app on Apple's platform their is a good chance they will screw you over without warning or explanation by blocking your app, yanking your app, changing the rules, calling you a pornographer, randomly charging you new fees, prohibiting whatever it is your app does, changing the hardware you're allowed to use, changing the software you're allowed to use, and many other ways that seem impossibly outrageous right now until it actually happens.

    Invest your time and money at your own risk. You've been warned.