Yes it happened, I have started to program the iStuff!

The initial burn came from one of my fellow workers who wants to have a mobile application based information system for our campus.

As of now iPhone/iPad programming will also become one of our course topics @Medical Information Technology 🙂

First Step, get the tools.

What do you need for developing:

First of all you need a  Mac OSX . (Snow Leopard preferably). The rumor says there is a chance to get it run under VMware, well, see for your self and read the apple OS license stuff 🙂

The next step is to get an IDE to program your applications. The IDE for programming iStuff is named XCode. XCode offers you all the needed tools to configure, manage, code, compile, debug, simulate and upload your applications to a device.

OK, but where do you get the goodies? Although XCode is free of charge you can not download it on the fly. Yes, you work with apple stuff and apple thinks different. Before you can download your development utils you have to register a developer account at apple. Go ahead -> iPhone Deveoper Center.

You can choose between 5 developer programs -> developer programs comparison link.

As you can see from the comparison chart you have to pay if you want to deploy your application to a physical device.

But we are lucky, for our first steps on iPhone developing we do not really need a hardware. XCode comes with an iPhone simulator. To write and run apps on the simulator you only have to be registered as developer! A registered developer can download the IDE but he cannot create certificates nor provisioning profiles. – But who wants that, … yet 🙂

OK, now we are a registered iPhone Dev., have installed our Xcode IDE + SDK, what next?… Next we have to learn Objective-C (ObjC). what…… C … no problem.

How to write your first application with ObjC and what are the essential parts in the iPhone SDK will be discussed in Part II. stay tuned,…

Have fun!