Summa

Applications for mobile platform are increasingly becoming an important market sector for all kinds of service providers. With the growing popularity of the iPhone and Apple’s well designed SDK, there are plenty of iPhone development project offerings even in this slow economic scenario. At Summa, we recently had a great experience developing a sleek iPhone application with a large user base. The purpose of this blog is to put together conceptual information along with project experiences around the important aspects of Objective-C’s memory management that would be helpful as one begins to delve deep into iPhone development.

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In our first post about whether or not an organization should consider building an iPhone application, we were walking through a series of questions:

• Why is my application a fit?
• Why now?
• How hard is it?
• What should I worry about?
• How do I get started?

Let’s pick up with “How hard is it”? If you want to reread about the first 2 questions - just jump back to the first part in the series.

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So - do you remember where you were on June 29, 2007? You probably didn’t realize it - but the world changed that day. No - this was no 9/11 type incident or Moon landing, this was the introduction of the first generation iPhone. With over 2 billion application downloads later, the iPhone has changed the way mobile computing is perceived and has forced its competitors to dramatically upgrade their product offerings to compete. There is so much momentum in mobile computing now, things will never be the same. But - that’s a good thing!

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For most developers coming from a Java or .Net background, there can be a rather steep learning curve when trying to pick up Objective C for iPhone development. This article serves as perhaps a starting point for these beginner iPhone Applications developers to get a sense of where the difference between the languages is, and where to concentrate their early learning efforts.

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My background is with mostly Java and Flex development, so there was a lot to get used to with Xcode. One of the steepest learning curves came with Interface Builder. With Interface Builder, you are making a choice: do I want to write my interface with code or do I want to design it with IB? There are pros and cons to both approaches, but it is good to know you are making the choice. After writing a large iPhone app, I have divined the following “lessons” for my own personal style.

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For many Java/C# developers, developing for a mobile device is a new experience. Of course - we have the fringe Windows Mobile and J2ME developers, but the vast majority have used Java/C# for web and application development only. In order to develop for a mobile device, you need to be able to run the software on the device, but is this the lone choice? Apple and the XCode development environment provide the iPhone Simulator, an application to run and debug iPhone software without using an actual device. While this is a fantastic productivity enhancement (reduces the time necessary to deploy the code to the device), you need to be careful with this ability.

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Welcome to the kickoff of Developing iPhone Applications, a series of blogs aimed at helping programmer, engineers, and architects coming from a Java/C# background to create rich, interactive applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Leveraging Summa’s experience and past projects, we are going to create blog entries on a variety of topics.

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