iPhone Development Environment (from scratch)

Question

I've developed on Windows and .NET for my whole career so forgive my ignorance on this one.

What would be the steps to setup an iPhone development environment from scratch?

Assume that I have nothing but electricity and an internet connection.

What hardware and software would I need?

I'm talking about the ideal environment here. If it can't be done on Windows that's fine.

Thanks.

Answer 1

1. You have to have an Intel mac¹ and an iPhone (or iPod Touch)
2. You need to apply to the iPhone developer program to run your program on your iPhone. You just need to register on the site to download the SDK and run things in the simulator.
3. Once accepted to the developer program or registered, download the iPhone SDK which includes XCode (the mac development environment). XCode comes on your OS install disks but it will be an old version and won't have the iPhone libraries.
4. Learn objective C.
5. Follow some iPhone specific tutorials or Stanford's online iPhone class.

<sarcasm> Read more in this Guardian article about how you can quit your job and make $20k a day from your iPhone app </sarcasm>

Footnotes: 1. Is it just the iPhone simulator that is restricted to Intel only Mac's?

Answer 2

What michaelpryor said, plus get a good book. I found it impossible to approach iphone programming without one. The one I used was from the Pragmatic Programmers.

By the way, if you want to cut costs, a mac mini or entry level macbook is fine for development. Get it with the minimum amount of memory and upgrade it to at least 2G memory yourself, as this is significantly cheaper than apple memory prices. With either one you should be able to reuse your existing screen, keyboard, mouse, usb disks, etc.

If you're going the mac mini route, you may want to hold off until the new models are in store, as rumours are they are going to announce a significant upgrade this week.

Oh and you don't need to download XCode, it comes on the install disks. Just download the SDK.

Last but not least, it may be stating the obvious, but you need an iphone device to test on. You can use the simulator in the SDK, but you still need to try it on a device. You can also use 'ad hoc distribution' to have friends with devices try your app out.

Good luck.