Basic Knowledge About iPhone Apps

For a considerable amount of time, iPhone has been in the market. Initially introduced in the USA, iPhone has reached in the nooks and corners of the whole world within a year and since been rising in popularity. Let’s have a look at some fundamental issues related to iPhone; its potentials and scopes for developers.

If you have not yet tried an iPhone I suggest you do that first. Having a set in your hand will generate further interest in you regarding its implementation. Some of you have loved its curves; some have liked its functions and we have loved its compact, sleek form, biggest screen size, and touch technology.

Now we hold that all of you know about iPhone’s advanced touch technology. Its multi-touch feature has taken care of simultaneous touches of two fingers at different positions. But this is not all and some other important features are:

Location finding: GPS tracking of the device around the globe.
Accelerometer and Orientation: this gives an inbuilt ability for detection of motion in 3 dimensions.
Programmable address book, vibrator, and camera.

These features make iPhone bigger than only a phone.

Programming Basics

iPhone’s 2008 released SDK is a developer’s toolkit, which allows a developer to swiftly develop an application.

Two kinds of applications can be developed:

1) Web Development.

2) Development of Native iPhone Application.

1) Using HTML or CSS, web applications run on browsers. Along with these, some programming languages generate dynamic contents like ASP.NET, JAVA, Ruby, and JSP.

2) Like iPhone or some other application device, native applications run. Along with using SDK, they use inbuilt frameworks of iPhone and some other frameworks supported by it.

iPhone SDK uses Objective C-Language. Programming platform of iPhone is Objective C and this is greatly different from Android (Java) based or Windows mobiles (VB.NET/C#). However, the approach taken by Objective C is totally different. Beginner learners who’re dealing with Mac OS, first time; Objective C create certain learning barriers.

iPhone OS is comprised of 4 different layers that are cocoa touch, core services, media and core OS. Each of them is comprised of several frameworks, which you can use in applications/programs.

Cocoa Touch

This is the base framework. Most of the time you will be dealing with this. This is comprised of an UI-kit framework that includes event support, window support, and UI management.

Media

This framework provides for protocols dealing with audio and video builds of iPhone.

Core Services

This comprises frameworks that are used in every application.

Core Operating System

This is a kernel level software. This deals with networking, threading, I/O operations etc.

To Develop an iPhone App

For starting to develop an iPhone program below mentioned things will be needed:

An Intel Mac run OS X Leopard v10.5.4/higher.
iPhone SDK.

Applications can be tested on a simulator but for a nominal amount, you can register yourself with iPhone developer program. A secured certificate would be issued to you by Apple that you can use for developing apps on the device. Therefore, two extra things are required:

iPhone mobile device
Registration for iPhone development program

Start Coding

To start coding you’ll need Xcode IDE and iPhone SDK. Both of them come with SDK package. We assume that by now, you have installed the application and afterwards, your Xcode application icon can be found in /developer/ applications folder.

Before beginning the application we suggest you take a few seconds and name your first app appropriately. Naming your apps is an important thing. This part comes after the installation process is over. Name of the app appears upon Home screen. This makes it more important. Be whatever its function, its name should be appropriate.

iPhone apps development is a specialized stream and has tremendous scope in present job market. Wannabe web developers can choose this as a career choice. For this, they should choose a high-quality training institution.

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Ayan Sarkar

Ayan Sarkar is one of the youngest entrepreneurs of India. Possessing the talent of creative designing and development, Ayan is also interested in innovative technologies and believes in compiling them together to build unique digital solutions. He has worked as a consultant for various companies and has proved to be a value-added asset for each of them. With years of experience in web development, product managing and building domains for customers, he currently holds the position of the CTO in Webskitters Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

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