As a new iPhone developer, one of the most important things you’ll need to learn and understand is memory management. It’s what you should study immediately after picking up the basics of Objective C. If you don’t understand memory management, you won’t be able to create an iPhone app.
To get your head around memory management, I recommend doing the following:
Everything you need to know about memory management in iOS is covered in these two resources.
FontView 1.1 is out on the App Store. For those unfamiliar with FontView, it’s an iPhone app for viewing and testing the fonts installed on the iPhone.
FontView 1.1 App Store link
I submitted my second iPhone app for approval today.
The process seemed much easier than for the first. That could be because I was better prepared or it could be because of the improvements Apple has made. It feels much more streamlined.
I also updated FontView and submitted over the weekend. I added high resolution icons for iPhone 4, tweaked the interface and added an iAd banner.
I’ve found myself with some spare time in the past couple of weeks, so I decided to start learning iPhone app development. After a couple of weeks I’m really getting into it and I thought I should document my experiences.
The first thing I did to get myself started was to buy a book to learn from. There are lots of book out on iPhone development now so it can be daunting to pick one out. I decided to grab iPhone for Programmers: An App-Driven Approach. Deitel books have always had a good reputation and I like the example driven approach.
I worked through about half of the book and I realised I wasn’t really learning anything very well because I started to just type the code into XCode and not understand what it actually did. I tried analysing the code and instructions to understand it better, but it wasn’t clear enough and it was making me drowsy.
So, I started reading the documentation on Apple’s iPhone developer website and watching the Stanford iPhone Application Development videos on iTuneU. They’re both really good resources. I highly recommend both. They give you a much better understanding of the fundamentals of the Objective-C language and the iPhone SDK.
At this stage I’m getting fairly comfortable with Objective-C and creating a basic iPhone app with multiple views. I haven’t registered for the iPhone developer Program yet, but will probably do that in the next week. In that time, I should also have a good grasp of using the Map Kit.
