This is the first in a series of many blogposts about me getting into developing for the iPhone. The iPhone is a very appealing platform, it has a beautiful big screen and a lovely multi-touch interface. I’m not going to go into the advantages of the iPhone because we all now what those are. I was interested in developing for the iPhone as soon as the SDK came out, but why do I really want to get started right now?

The reason for that is quite easy. In school we have this subject called SBP (Small Business Project). It was created to give young people some sense of doing business. Maybe we’ll want to start our own company in a couple of years and this will surely make that process easier. So you have to choose a product of which you think would appeal to a lot of people. Then you have to make sure that your idea looks good on paper (having a good business plan, cost analysis,…). And the last step is to really go out and produce the product.

I (and some fellow students) have the idea of developing an iPhone app. I will tell you more about the functionalities later. The main idea for this application isn’t really new, but we have quite a few tricks up our sleeves to make this application attractive. My job is to create the iPhone app. My partner in crime, Miquël Vermeulen, is going to develop the Windows Mobile version of the app.

How did i get started?

• I downloaded the iPhone SDK from the Apple developer website.
  The SDK is stunning to say the least. It provides you with the all tools you need. It has a very good IDE called XCode, the iPhone Simulator, Instruments (a tool to check the performance of your app so you can quickly see where the app needs some more work) and Interface Builder.
• I bought the book “The iPhone Developer Cookbook” by Erica Sadun.
  This book is very well structured and well documented. It helps you to get started quickly. This book suggests that you have knowledge of Objective C, the main programming language used on the Macintosh platform. I don’t have that knowledge but I’m quite sure my knowledge of Java will get me somewhere.

But it’s not only the development of the app that is going to take some time. We also have to get some people interested in our idea and project because all of this costs money, money we don’t have being poor students. So far it’s been fun to get in touch with all these interesting people. I’m sure I will learn a lot through this project and from these people. This will surely be a very important period in my further career as a developer. That’s it for the first post. Check back later to keep in touch with how things are developing.

Greets

Brecht