More iPhone/iTouch love
I’ve been playing some more with the iPhone/iTouch. Despite much headbanging, I think I’ve got through most of the major frustrations that can be so commonplace when trying to learn something somewhat alien and or new. The lack of documentation (and a debugger) has made progress somewhat peculiar and retarded, but the number of resources popping up has certainly reduced my blind stumbling in a rake-field to more of a dizzy meander through a china-shop. (Small pic here shows current progress of my action puzzler! oh and yes i know it looks a lot like roadies now…. shhh)
Next up - a prediction. Game and application development for this is going to be massive. There have been to date 100 Million iPods sold. Thats a lot. Compare this to 65 million DSs and 15 million PSPs. Assuming that Apple chooses to phase in the iPod touch OS as the default OS for the iPod, this guarantees a fair number of potential customers. Assuming that people have a copy of iTunes and an internet connection, purchase for them is extremely simple. Not to mention the fact that people could potentially buy games straight from their iTouch/iPhone. I’m no nostradamus (and as a disclaimer I have backed some exceedingly shabby horses in the past) but there seems to be very little that apple have done wrong with this. Development is extremely easy - playing with the development libraries available with the current toolchain, a lot of the nasty stuff is taken care of with reasonably high-level libraries - be that networking, graphics, animation, 3D, audio, GUI. Its very similar to development on OSX.
If you are interested in doing some more playing, here are a few recommendations (caution nerdcore).
Get this book - iPhone Open Application Development. Its only a tenner for the PDF (”rough cut” available now) and gives you EXACTLY what you need to get started and a great overview of Objective-C and the iPhone libraries.
Learn Cocoa (if you are on OSX). Go through the tutorials at Cocoa Dev Central to learn about cocoa foundation classes and cocoa graphics. These are very similar to the iPhone’s frameworks.
Be careful with memory management. This was the cause of most of my frustration. Lots of classes kept disappearing and without a debugger I had no idea whats going on. Setting autorelease doesnt mean a class gets garbage collected when its no longer referenced. It means it will get deleted automatically at the end of the current event loop. damnit.
Get some nice Xcode templates from here. These even take care of SSHing into the device so the code will be easy to run as soon as you build.
