Getting started with iPhone development – #3: tools, Xcode

Watched two more videos – Development Tools Overview and Application Development. I love these videos.  They’re like watching people from the dharma initiative (if you watch Lost you know what I mean) host shows on the set of Charlie Rose. The background is all black and the hosts wear a canvas colored shirt with a subtle Apple logo..like soldiers in the Apple army.

The tools are amazing and Xcode is truly impressive.   Before getting into Rails/Ruby, I did some work with VB.NET and C# using Visual Studio.net. What I liked about Visual Studio was the powerful IDE and all the niceties it offered – code completion, drag and drop controls, etc.  I also liked the way they tried to make the experience of developing for the desktop so consistent with the way you develop for the desktop. Xcode is similar. The tightness of the package is evident immediately. I mean, for better or worse, the Windows analogy is sort of  there. In the same way .Net is all Windows, Xcode is all Mac. To develop for the iPhone, you must develop on an Intel based Mac, use Xcode, have an iPhone (or iTouch) and your app…only runs on the iPhone. There’s no other device it could run on, but you know what I mean.

One thing I’d wondered about before starting this trip was: how hard it would be to get from actually writing an application to getting the thing onto the device? Shockingly easy, is appears. ‘Build and Go’ is the button that gets you from here to there. Target the device or the iPhone simulator and your app is there. Looks so easy. The brief intro to Objective-C and Cocoa Touch are also very cool. I don’t know the language yet, but my friend, who is  doing this with me boiled it down concisely: ‘it’s just syntax.’  It is all the same, really, when you think about it. It’s object oriented and dynamic and MVC is the pattern that is used ‘pervasively throughout’ which is good to hear.