Minnebar: Intro to iPhone Development with Jesse O'Neill-Oine

Jesse O'Neill-Oine from Refactr presented on development for the iPhone at Minnebar (his slides can be found on the Refactr blog).

O'Neill-Oine opened by explaining how he was turned onto iPhone development: "I'm into iPhone development because I frickin' love my iPhone." This seemed to be a shared perspective among the audience.

Apple takes a 30% cut on your app's cost. You can only distribute through the App Store, which is both a weakness and a strength. You must be part of the developer program to be eligible to publish applications to the App Store.

Current versions of iPhones have only 128mb of RAM. Apple does not allow any background processing within apps. Plus: you get access to the whole machine when your app is running. Weakness, can't run an always-on application. This could be hackable, but that would prevent your app from distribution through the App Store.

Development Requirements: You have to be on a Mac (maybe an Intel based Mac)? Within Organizer, you can manage iPhone settings, firmware upgrades/downgrades, and capture screenshots among other things.

iPhone OS is derived from 10.5. Cocoa Touch is where developers will spend most of their time. Windowing, graphics support, buttons, sliders, and event handling such as touch events will happen at this layer.

The media layer is where core animation is done. Allows you to go beyond what can be done at the cocoa layer.

The core services layer is where SQL Lite is found. If you're writing a data-intensive application, this is recommended. XML and XLST are also supported at this level.

You can access both Edge and WiFi from the the iPhone Simulator during development.

Apple provides a lot of example applications that demonstrate functionality of iPhone coding.

The developer's site has great documentation but no community. Cocoa Dev is a pretty good site, but still looking for a strong iPhone development community. If you know of one, please drop it in the comments.

Where are the Women?

Amazingly, there was not a single woman in the standing room only discussion of iPhone development. That's pretty of scary considering that the iPhone is a universally popular device. While the guys in the room seem perfectly capable of building apps, it seems like there is a huge opportunity for iPhone development with a woman's perspective.

I wanted to let you guys know that I'm starting up a new CocoaHeads chapter in the Twin Cities. Our focus will be on both Mac and iPhone development. The first meeting is next month.

Amazingly, there was not a single woman in the standing room only discussion of iPhone development.

This question always comes up amongst minority groups. How are products going to work for you if you're not involved in the development process? Ultimately some things won't be developed differently, but you never know until it happens. All the focus groups and market research in the world won't provide the same results as having a diverse development team.

FWIW, I think I counted on two hands and one foot the number of women in attendance at MinneBar.

Thanks for this, Ed -- I would have loved to catch this session, but had to tweet another one at the same time for www.Minnov8.com ...so, I'm glad you put this online!

Your point about women is especially relevant in light of a recent study I saw, showing that women are taking to the iPhone in a greater percentage than other phones! So, words to the wise....

And, Erica, it was great you were at Minnebar (again) -- you set the example! :-)

Comments

1. Posted by: andy on May 10, 2008 5:39 PM:

Sorry, but all the information in this article could have been gleaned from watching a couple of the Apple introductory videos, or browsing the iPhone developer website.

The nearest thing to a community at the moment is the Developer discussion group in the Mac OS X technologies section of the Apple discussion groups

Required fields marked with: *
Name*:

Email Address*:

URL:
Remember personal info?

Comments*:

HTML Tags you can use in your posts:
<b>Bold</b> = Bold
<i>Italicized</i> = Italicized
<a href="http://www.othersite.com">Link to Other Site</a> = Link to Other Site

Please keep comments on-topic. Contact authors or other commenters
directly for off-topic conversations.

Notify me of future comments via e-mail

Technology Evangelist Digest - Free Newsletter

Sign up for the free Technology Evangelist Digest to receive daily updates, editorials, and practical advice on emerging technology trends in hardware, software, webware, marketing and beyond.

Technology Evangelist Digest will keep you up to date on the technology trends that will help make you more productive and efficient both in business and your personal life.

Let's face it: If you made it to this line, you must have found something valuable on this page, right? Think about how cool it would be to have something free and interesting to read every day from Technology Evangelist by signing up today.

1. Fill in your email below,
2. Then click on the confirmation email you receive.
3. That's it. Your first Technology Evangelist Digest will arrive within 24 hours.