A few days with the official iPhone SDK
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008(Warning, bit of a technical post). I’ve had a couple of days to play with the official iPhone SDK now that it has been released. Its obviously significantly easier to get things up and running now and theres a lot of documentation and a number of videos up at the iPhone DevCenter. First up, the presentation for the SDK launch was pretty impressive. Dual distribution, both via iTunes and the AppStore directly on the iPhone/touch and a 70% cut of the royalties is extremely fertile soil for development. £50 to sign up to be a registered iPhone developer (and allow signing of your apps) is not bad. They’ve obviously had a few inspirations from Installer.app (eg autoupdating of apps) and the whole package looks very streamlined and easy to use. They’ve handed out beta copies of the SDK, allowing anyone to have a go (even without an iPhone). The SDK includes a simulator, allowing you to run and debug your apps on the desktop, and also allows tethered running and remote debugging for a physical unit that you have plugged in (although you will need to have paid your £50 and got yourself a certificate, none of which Apple has released yet). The frustrating part is that without the certificate you are slightly crippled by the fact that the emulator won’t properly support the accelerometer or multitouch (other than basic pinch gestures) and most significantly for games, it wont allow OpenGL code.
That all said, its been great fun. I’ve been getting my head round the basics (Core Animation, Multitouch input, Quartz rendering), and am trying to piece together a toolkit for making games. First priority is rendering and a physics engine, so (much like the excellent iPhysics) I’ve been playing with Erin Catto’s wonderful Box2D engine, and ported the TestBed over to the iPhone just as a little warm up project to get my head round the SDK. I think Quartz might be a little slow but as soon as I can get a certificate I can start using OpenGL instead which should hopefully start to really allow more complex scenes.
Heres a little vid of the Box2D testbed running (although embedded vimeo doesnt work on Google Reader sadly):
Also, it looks like firmware 2.0 has already been leaked and hacked, bypassing the need for you to obtain a certificate from Apple. This should certainly speed things up for some.
