iPhone Development Resources
Programming for the iPhone is still pretty new. It
might be a bit tougher to find iPhone developer resources, but we found
a bunch that will get you through building any iPhone app you might be
starting on. Check out our list of our favorite developer books, blogs,
podcasts, screencasts, open-source libraries, communities, forums,
conferences, training, and more!
Books
This is the go-to book for beginning iPhone developers by
Jeff Lamarche and
Dave Mark. It takes you from downloading the SDK to creating your very own apps. The official page and support site:
http://iphonedevbook.com/
This is the book to get if you’re just starting out programming. It
assumes you have no prior programming knowledge before picking it up.
It’s highly recommended for people who don’t know any programming and
want to learn Objective-C. Not a lot of iPhone-specific stuff in this
one, but a lot of this knowledge will carry over when you do want to
create iPhone apps.
This book assumes you know a bit of C/C++, and it’s a really good
book for getting started with Apple’s developer frameworks. There isn’t a
lot of iPhone-specific stuff in this book, but a lot of what you learn
carries over into iPhone development.
This book is in beta still, so you can only get the PDF. It was
originally scheduled to be released by now, but they are updating it to
include iPhone SDK 3.0. It’s still worth it to get the PDF. I’ve gone
through it, and it is fantastic. The book is now set to be released in
September.
This book is full of code snippets that will help a lot of people
with common tasks that Apple’s iPhone SDK doesn’t provide. There are
some code blunders in this book, but luckily they’ve fixed the code and
put it up
here. They also have movies at this site that demonstrate what each mini-project does.
The iPhone in Action book covers both native and web programming in
step-by-step tutorials. It’s a complete primer to iPhone development.
Blogs
The best iPhone developer blog I’ve seen. It’s written by
Dan Grigsby and
Ari Braginsky.
I recommend you start with the top posts on the right sidebar and go
through all the archives. Pretty much all of the articles are gold.
This blog has some of the best iPhone app building tutorials on the
web. They have newbie tutorials as well as multi-part advanced tutorials
ranging from Hello World to game development. The “ToDo List Using
SQLite” tutorial series is a good start for a new developer to learn a
breadth of concepts.
The meat of this site is the video tutorials. The videos are
separated into different levels of complexity. Good site for
audio/visual learners.
Dr. Touch gives us a mix of specific programming solutions as well
his experiences with the App Store and his sales. The recipes section of
his blog have really useful code snippets to help you build your app.
Jeff Lamarche is also the author of
Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK. He keeps his blog updated constantly with cutting-edge code and even a guide to
surviving WWDC.
This blog isn’t updated as often as some of the others, but the
articles that do come out are really useful. My favorite recent one is
How to Detect Network Availability.
71squared has some great iPhone game development tutorial
collections. It is updated quite often, and anyone interested in iPhone
game development should check it out.
It’s a fusion of iPhone app marketing and coding. Most of the site is focused on marketing your app.
This blog isn’t updated that much these days, but the articles are still useful. It’s 100 percent dedicated to code tutorials.
Jeff Scott writes about
various iPhone app marketing tips and analytics. The blog is focused on
the business side of iPhone apps. It’s fairly new and looks very
promising.
A how-to focused blog run by
John Muchow. The posts are put together in nice bite-size pieces.
Bill Dudney is an author/screencaster with the
Pragmatic Programmers
family. The books and screencasts he makes are good for beginners, but a
lot of the stuff on his blog address more complicated coding issues and
bugs in the SDK.
Podcasts/Screencasts
Stanford open-sourced its lecture, slides, and course material to the
world. It’s available for free in iTunes. Watch the presentation by
Loren Brichter of Tweetie fame when you get a chance.
Awesome podcast series with iPhone app developers and their successes
(and struggles) running iPhone app businesses. They always have A-list
guests.
If you’re more of a video learner, start with the
Coding in Objective-C 2.0 and
Becoming Productive in Xcode screencasts. Follow that with the five-part
Writing Your First iPhone Application screencast. If you really want to get fancy with transitions and animations, check out the
Creating a Compelling User Interface with Core Animation screencast.
Peepcode is usually known for its Ruby resources, but it has a great
screencast that teaches you about Objective-C. It’s edited by Scott
Stevenson of great Objective-C resource,
CocoaDevCentral.
Great conversations about everything related to iPhone apps. The podcasts are about an hour or so long.
The iPhone Alley Podcast is a weekly roundtable with different iPhone
app media peeps and creators. Each episode is very entertaining.
This site has some great video tutorials — and a lot of them, too.
He’s made 25 of them, including a sneak peek at some new 3.0 features.
Open-Source Libraries
Three20 is a collection of iPhone UI classes, like a photo viewer,
and general utilities, like an HTTP disk cache. Three20 is derived from
the Facebook iPhone app, which is one of the most downloaded iPhone apps
ever.
Bullet is a free, professional 3D game multiphysics library used in some popular games in the App Store.
Cocos2d for the iPhone is a framework for building 2D games for the
iPhone and iPod touch. There’s a great community around this open-source
engine, so there’s plenty of support to help you get your iPhone game
out there.
Matt Gemmell has some
great code out there for the community, including MGTwitterEngine, the
Twitter API used in iPhone apps Birdhouse and Twitteriffic.
An open-source collection of 31 mini-iPhone app projects to get you up and running fast.
Communities/Forums
The greatest iPhone developer community on the Internet.
Chris Stewart’s
site boasts nearly 6,000 registered users. The forums are very active.
You’ll find yourself visiting this site at least once a day.
Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site
for programmers — regardless of platform or language. Every question
asked on the site will almost always get a correct answer.
Great community of developers on this forum. They even include some nice guides for getting started with iPhone development.
Conferences/Training
WWDC is Apple’s official developer conference. All the cutting-edge
programming topics are taught here. The 2009 one runs from June 8-12.
WWDC is the Mac daddy of all iPhone conferences. Get it? Mac daddy? I’m
here all night, folks.
360|iDev is the premiere iPhone, iPod touch developer conference in
the world. The next one will be a four-day event and will take place
September 27-30, 2009 in Denver, Colo. They have a call for papers right
now if you want to make a debut as a conference speaker.
Here you will learn how to build iPhone applications from experienced iPhone developers
Bill Dudney and Daniel Steinberg in this four-day training course. The next one runs August 4-7, 2009 in Reston, Va.
iPhoneDevCamp is the brainchild of
Raven and
Dom.
The event format is “unconference” or Barcamp-style, featuring content
from the participants themselves. There are satellite events held all
over the country. The next one is this August.
This conference is for all game developers, and there’s an increasing
number of mobile app game developers. If you’re a game developer or
want to be one, this is the one game developer conference to go to.
This is more of a general developer conference, not just iPhone
developers. The beauty of this conference is that it’s in multiple
locations and dates, and it only costs $99. Plus, you get to hang out
with
Joel Spolsky.
Other Collections Of Resources
The Apple engineers give us a lot of information to get started with
app development. There are a lot of resources that Apple provides
including documentation, how-tos, videos, code samples and forums.
This site is updated daily with the best iPhone developer links on
the web. It’s driven by the community submissions, and all the links are
top-quality here. The site is maintained by the
Mobile Orchard crew.
MattJ’s collection of iPhone developer resources. A lot of good stuff here including our very own
Create A Drum App tutorial.
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