After an insane amount of headbanging I’ve finally managed to get a working toolchain up and running, compiled, deployed and run a game on my iPhone. The Jailbreaking part wasn’t too hard (just followed the instructions in the Jailbreak 1.1.2 package), but getting the compiler, libraries and paths set-up was a complete nightmare. (Those of you thinking about doing the same under Leopard, just follow the instructions here and make sure you set up your .arm-cc-specs file).

So, is it any good? Yes! Having played with Installer.app and a few of the recently released packages, theres already a ton of good stuff out there. I was a bit disappointed with the speed of NES.app but the ScummVM port runs beautifully (and is perfectly suited to the screen/interface). Theres a pretty nifty version of solitaire.

In terms of picking apart source (is there a better way to learn?) the first thing I dug around was Bounce by CeD (source code here). This led on to a real seam of practical learning bits, using a lot of the different aspects of the device (including multi-touch, tilting), at the iApp-a-Day page (all of the code for each application is available here).

It looks like a pretty good development environment. UI bits and pieces are handled by UIKit, and you have a reasonable graphics library with CoreGraphics for blitting, bitmap manipulation. Not had a play with any of the OpenGL|ES stuff yet. I’ve got a few ideas I’d like to work up, but will probably spend a little while getting to grips with Objective-C and the libraries first. What fun!

Update: Theres an ideal OpenGL example here by Andrew Willmott. Shows how to render an OpenGL scene within a normal Application.