iPhone Development Step By Step-2

We shall now have a look at each of the requirements in detail..

Apple Mac Pro Computer

After spending 11 years with PCs and Microsoft Operating system, I was finally forced to move on to a Apple Mac Computer for iPhone development. I first tried with a mini MAC, but soon I realized that the 1.3GB iPhone SDK is too much burden for it and i switched to a Intel based iMac.

iPhone 3G

This device is now available all over the world with different schemes. I got mine at $750, which is too high, but without an operator restriction. Please note that iPhone 2G cannot be used for development as such, but could be upgraded to the 2.0 firmware.

Mac OS 10.5.5 or above

Apple names its OS versions with names of different animals in CAT family.

10.3.x is known as Panther
10.4.x is known as Tiger
10.5.x is known as Leopard

iPhone Development requires 10.5.4 or higher. You can upgrade your OS using the built in upgrade facility or by downloading a newer version's image.


XCode IDE & Interface Builder 3.1.1
iPhone SDK 2.1

Both of the above comes in a single pack as 'iPhone SDK' which is a huge 1.3GB DMG file. This could be downloaded from developer.apple.com/iphone
after a free sign up.

Installation is pretty straight forward. I selected all the default options and the installation was successful.



Objective C language

You will need to have a basic idea of the language. You can use the account created for downloading iPhone SDK to log on to the apple developer site and use the documentation for reading about Objective C. The real learning starts only when you start programming with it.

iPhone Development Certification

Oh yea.. the hardest part of all...

You need to register for developer program and wait indefinitely until one lucky day when you will receive a mail from apple where u have a link to pay $99 to get your access to the iPhone developer portal, where you have the tools to create certificates for testing the application on your real device.

However for writing and testing applications on the iPhone emulator that ships with the SDK, you wont require the certificate. Certificate is only require to test the application on a real iPhone.

Next, we will see creating the first Hello world application for iPhone..