iPhone developer's Journey
Get Started in iPhone Applications Developing
This section will give you the basics of what you need to do to get you started. Where to go on the net, what to buy and what to learn will be shown here.
1. Buy a Mac.
It's the very first step. Even though it seems to be pretty simple, there's still a lot of people over the internet thinking they can build an iPhone app with a PC. We can't blame them since there is so much rumors going on that it is easy to get lost. What's nice with this kind of developing, is that any intel-based mac will work. If you're short on money, you can either buy a used Mac or, my prefered alternative, buy a MacMini. Yes the MacMini is the cheapest of all Macs and will give you plenty of power to develop. The release of the new MacMini gen makes it just better. Here's an interesting quote from Peter Scott, CTO at Connect2Media: "they are more than powerful enough, small, easy on desk space when you already have PCs, three LCD monitors and a bunch of devices. They are also easy to move round, developers can take them home at the weekend if they want to continue to work."
Another advantage of using the MacMini is that you'll be able to use all your old peripherals such as keybord, lcd screen, mous, etc. This makes it again more affordable.You can still buy a Mac Pro if you can afford it, but a Mac Mini shoud do what you bought it for. Let's go to our next step now.
2. Buy and read books.
If your new to this whole thing of programming, you need to start learning. Hpefully, after a couple of months of waiting, there's now a bunch of nice books out there that can help you. Here's some of my suggestions. If you are totally new to programming, you absolutely have to read Chris Pine's book Learn to Program. This book will give you a pretty good programming base even though it's written for the ruby platform.
Next, two other books are inevitable. These two books are from Apress and have become bible for new programmers. The first one is called Learn objective-C on the Mac by Mark Dalrymple and Scott Knaster. Again, this book will provide you the information you need on Objective-C programming but it assumes you have some base in the programming domain. That's why I suggested you the Learn to program book earlier. After reading this book, you'll have two attack the second of the series, still from Apress and written by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche, called Beginning iPhone development Exploring the iPhone SDK. Now it's getting more concrete and it's about time after all these books read.
Now we can start thinking developing an iPhone app. The next suggestion is iPhone SDK development Building an iPhone application by Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson. It's a little step forward from the last book and again it relies on a little knowledge that you've acquired in the earlier books. With all these suggestions, you should be able to build an application. If you want to build more complex application, I suggest you to chek the Apress series with their books like iPhone advanced projects, iPhone user interface projects or iPhone game projects.
3. Developper Connection
Now that you mastered the programming languages and the iPhone SDK, it's time to sign up to the iPhone Dev Center. By signing up you'll have acces to the iPhone SDK and many other tools that will help you during the process. It's the place to go for any questions or interrogations. I also strongly suggest you to watch the video “Getting Started Videos” in the iPhone Dev Center" (You need to be logged in in order to see it). Everyting is free for developpers until the moment you want to put your application on your device. This is the moment where you have to pay 99$. After the payment you will also be able to send your applications to apple in order to have it approved. But there's still a lot of work to do until this very moment.
4. Start playing around
You know how to program and code. You are now part of the Developper connection. You're ready to begin testing your newly acquired knowledge. Again the Apple developper connection will help you getting started. It provides sample code that will help you if you don't know where to start. Play with it and practice all you can it's the only way you will get better.
That's it. You are now ready to begin developing your iPhone applications. It may takes up to 6 or 8 months but there's nothing like seeing your applications running on your iPhone so don't give up! Don't be afraid to look around for some ressources over the internet. The amount of these ressources and community is unbelievable and it is still growing. My prefered one are cocadev.com and cocoadevcentral.com where ther's a lot of great tutorials and a nice community.
I'll post another article explaining what happens next after your applications is done and ready to go for the Apple approval. I'll give you some Marketing tips to promote your app and how to get known on the AppStore.
P.S. I will post this article on the forum too so we can start a discussion about it and give you the opportunity to ask questions or add contents that could improve this article. Click here to acces the article in the forum.