Apple Computers and their MacOS came into existence long before Windows OS. But Windows is the one that dominates the OS world. Whatever may be the reason for it, but this is the fact. Due to this reason, majority of the software developers doesn't have any idea about the MacOS and they care the least about it. That was ok till now, until the release of iPhone and iPhone SDK.

Now iPhone, which contains a stripped down version of MacOS, is so popular that any software developers would like to try developing an application for it.

But for a .NET, Windows Mobile or J2ME developer, the hurdles to cross before running their hello world on an iPhone 3G are so many such as...


To see a "hello world" application on your iPhone, you will have to deal with all the items in the list above. Though there can be few compromises in some, generally you will need all of the above.

I will go through each of these in the forthcoming posts to give you a better idea..

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

Apple Mac Pro Computer

After spending 22 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 Mac Pro.

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..

After installing iphone sdk, the xcode IDE shortcut is automatically placed on the dock. If it does not appear, you are recommended to create one manually.

Running the XCode IDE wont show up any window, and this may confuse any first time .NET developers. Instead, there is a global menu bar on top of the desktop that shows the menu of the currently running application. Lame !

Once you find the menu bar, select File > New Project

Then you will be taken to a dialog where different project types are available to choose from. In the left side panel select iPhone application.

Then in the rightside pan we will start with a view based application and press create

Enter helloworld when a name for the project is prompted. The wizard creates a runnable empty project named hello world.

Press the Build and Go button which is a green color play button on the tool bar of the hello world project window…

If every thing was fine, you will see the iPhone emulator running for the first time, then loading your new empty white screen project on iPhone. You can end the project by pressing the iPhone bottom screen button, and then you will see the icon of your application on the iphone emulator.

Now we need to make this empty application into a Hello World application.


Find the helloworldViewController.m file in the project files in the right pan, click on it to view it’s contents in the bottom pan.

Scroll till the last line of the code where u see the line

@end

Paste the following code before the @end line, and press build and go…


You will see an iPhone message box that says “hello iPhone World”