My Time With The iPhone SDK

Since it was first announced a year ago, I've been wanting to kick the tires on the iPhone SDK. The developer tools looked pretty impressive, though they're basically the same as those used for the Mac, and I tend to love all things Apple.

Up until about a month ago I haven't really had the motivation. Obviously I've spent my days working and it's hard as a father of young children to pick up the computer and start writing code on what little free time I get.

I needed a little help so I ordered Beginning iPhone Development, and fortunately I came into some free time as my previous project was winding down.

This book was easily the best technical book I've ever read. The examples are great and the code is broken down into chunks and explained thoroughly. On top of all that the authors threw in a lot of humor to make it a fun read.

One of the most daunting things for me has been figuring out Objective-C and developing in an environment without a garbage collector. Thus far in my career the bulk of my experience has been in Java and .NET, so keywords like alloc, retain, and release are foreign to me.

Also the majority of my UI work has been using HTML, though I do have some fat client experience with Swing and .NET. Cocoa uses a similar event model as what I've seen before, however it's taken a little while to get my head wrapped around nibs, which can be thought of as freeze dried objects in an XML format, kind of like a Spring config file in the Java world.

Now that I've built a foundation of knowledge for iPhone development, I hope I get to use it in the real world soon.