Demian's Blog

Drew Crawford has written an excellent article How to find an iPhone developer that describes some of the details involved in building an iPhone app and dispelling many common myths.

• All you have to do is find a developer
• No, your app is not “simple”
• The good developers are always busy
• But this five-star company on eLance offered to make my app for $10!
• How to find a developer
• If you don’t have $5k, walk away

A client showed me this today, really impressive.

The folks over at Packt publishing have published a nice succinct overview to get you started building your first iPhone app.  Of course it’s a Hello World! program, and, despite a few errors, it serves as a useful introduction, including a brief overview of the structure of the iPhone OS .

In order to make the example work

• ignore the references to FirstApp.m, the author is referring to FirstAppAppDelegate.m which was created for you
• you also need to remove [window addSubview:viewController.view]; from the applicationDidFinishLaunching method

Matt Gemmell recently published the iPhone Development Emergency Guide – quite handy if you’re just getting into iPhone development.

“I have an idea for an iPhone application.”

Just kidding  Sure you’ve heard this phrase a million times too, and everyone wants you to sign their NDA so you can be let into their inner circle and gain access to the golden wisdom.

Turning iPhone ideas into applications is a bit dated now, with respect to some of the prices quoted which have since lowered a little, but it is a refreshing insight into what really counts when it comes to building a killer iPhone app: execution, execution, execution

Check out this detailed account from Streaming Colour about what went into developing Dapple, a top-selling game.  The developer gives a detailed account of the work involved included a week-by-week breakdown covering 27 weeks.

This article has a great comparison between iPhone and Android development.  It breaks down all aspects of development including:

• language, model and platform
• testing and continuous integration
• resources and tooling
• IDE
• UI builder
• debugger
• profiler and heap analysis
• appstore/sales

An excellent rebuttal to this article can be read here.

Some interesting tutorials if you’re just getting started with iPhone dev:

1. Objective-C and Interface Builder
2. First iPhone Application
3. Basic iPhone Programming
4. Cocoa Touch Tutorial
5. iPhone SDK Tutorial: Build a Simple RSS reader for the iPhone
6. How to make an iPhone Application on XCode
7. iPhone Application Tutorial
8. iPhone Dev Sessions: How To Make An Orientation-Aware Clock
9. iPhone Programming Tutorial – Creating a ToDo List Using SQLite Part 1
10. Make an iPhone App Using the Envato API

Read Later is an app that lets you save web pages on your iPhone/iPod for offline reading.  Not the first app to do that?  Well it’s integrated with delicious.com so any bookmarks you tag with a to_read tag (or any tag of your choice) are detected by the app and downloaded for offline reading.

And when you’re finished reading the article on your iPhone, hitting the ‘mark as read’ button sends a request to delicious and your read_later tag is removed.  Nice, simple and clean.  And currently free in the AppStore.

The articles are a pleasure to read on the iPhone.  All flashing ads, graphics and irrelevant distractions are removed for you.  You just get the cleaned text for easy reading.  The app’s description says it best:

• All web pages are cleaned and stripped of irrelevant adverts for easy reading on the iPhone.
• Store hundreds of  webpages on your iPhone
• Read Later remembers which article your were last reading
• Sync your iPhone with your Delicious account to get our latest bookmarks

Apparently there are currently 1.5m “to_read” and similar tags on delicious so there must be a lot of folks using this system to flag articles for later reading.  Check it out.