The Quantum Pontiff

Starting iPhone Programming Tips

Posted by Dave Bacon on April 24, 2009
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A few small tips for what to do when starting up programming for the iPhone.

Just a few tips from my experience in learning to program apps for the iPhone.

  • Don’t begin by using Interface Builder. Interface Builder may be a great tool once you understand what is going on, but it obscures a lot of the basics when you are starting up. As a corollary, tutorials which use Interface Builder aren’t as useful as those that don’t.
  • Right click is your friend for looking up documentation in Xcode. Want to remember more about UIViewController? Simply right click on “UIViewController” and pull up a documentation search or the API entry.
  • If you’ve never programmed in objective-C, I recommend digging through “The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language.” After that I highly recommend reading “iPhone Application Programming Guide.”
  • stackoverflow.com is a great source for finding answers to your questions.
  • Stanford has a class on iPhone programming with lectures available on the iTunes U.
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Comments

  1. #1 liquidthinker
    April 30, 2009

    The last 2 points looked particularly helpful and I’ll have to pass that along to Mrs. LiquidThinker (the real iPhone programmer among the 2 of us). Thanks for the tips. The beginning 3 points I think she already figured out.

    Now what a quantum computing guy could possibly be doing writing apps for the iPhone, I haven’t the faintest. :) Good luck though. It’s a pretty saturated market.

  2. #2 Dave Bacon
    April 30, 2009

    Everyone has to have a hobby, even quantum computing dudes.

  3. #3 liquidthinker
    May 1, 2009

    Very cool. It’s a fun hobby (meant totally nonsarcastically). Plus iMacs are fun machines on which to work. My wife is also pretty tickled whenever anyone buys stuff she wrote. It’s not the money, which isn’t that much yet, just having something out there being useful to somebody.

    Just keep the security certificates straight (lessons learned the hard way) and have good tags. Of course, you know that as a blogger already :) .

  4. #4 dhea
    November 17, 2009

    I posted a cheat sheet for beginners to Objective-C 2.0 some time ago that you may have checked out. Now the reason that I created this cheat sheet is because I know there are alot of developers out there with an understanding of Java, C++ or C# who would like to dive into iPhone development, but don’t have the time to go through an entire Objective-C 2.0 book. So if you’re in this boat this is something you might want to check out.