Rex Flex

Those of you that know me in real life probably realize that I have a tendency to obsess about something for awhile, then sort of forget about it. Well, my latest obsession has been developing native applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

For those of you that haven’t heard, apple has released their SDK. This means that the development tools are available to easily create applications for the iPhone, with apple’s blessing. After I saw some of the applications that were created, I was pretty much hooked.

I decided to start looking into getting the SDK, then realized that it was only available to those running OSX. So, I looked into virtualization options for running OSX on a PC. I didn’t really find a whole lot. Sure, there’s VMWare, Virtual PC, etc; however I couldn’t find anywhere where these solutions supported OSX specifically. I looked into it a little more and found out that there is a clause in OSX’s EULA that states it’s not to be run in a virtualized environment. After finding this out, I decided to go ahead and just get a new Mac.

So, I’m now typing this up on my new Mac Mini (the cheapest Mac they had at the apple store). Apple also has a program called one to one, where you can schedule appointments to go in and learn how to use your Mac. The email they sent me states, “learn how to do everything you ever wanted on a Mac–with your trainer beside you every step of the way”, so I plan to take advantage of that and try to get them to teach me the basics of XCode. I’ve installed the SDK and I am now exploring, trying to figure out just what you have to do to create an application for the iPhone. From what I’ve found so far, there’s not a whole lot to it.

1. You have to learn Objective-C, which if you know any other programming language, really isn’t a big deal. From what I can tell, it’s very much like C with some syntax changes.
2. If you want to hook up your application to run directly on the iPhone, as shown in the roadmap, you’ll need to sign up for the beta and fork over $99. As I understand it now, they’ve only accepted a very select few people to start the beta, but will expand it to more people once it gets rolling. It sounds to me like apple’s getting their partners in early so they can have a little jump start, but what do I know, I’m just an infrequent blogger.
3. You need to be able to go in and make positioning, size, color, etc changes to the UI in the code. From what I’ve seen so far, the Interface Builder isn’t working for iPhone apps yet. Unless anyone can show me otherwise, I’m going to be doing these things by hand for awhile.

Coming from a C# (Visual Studio) background it is quite different. But I almost feel as though I’m getting back to my computer science roots. New things to explore and fiddle with.

That’s really it, I haven’t run into a whole lot, however I’ve only really created a Hello World program, which I basically copied from an example on apple’s site. I’ll be sure to keep my blog updated with things I encounter and create.