What is the easiest way for a non-programmer to learn the basics of iPhone App creation? [closed]

Question

I'm primarily a designer, with a fairly high level of understanding of CSS and HTML. I have an idea for a very simple iPhone app, largely involving a timer, an animated graphic, and some sound. If I get more advanced there could be some simple customization settings

I have no understanding of Objective C, or C of any kind for that matter. (The closest I got was a Pascal course 20 years ago.) Aside from befriending a developer with motivation to help me out, what would be the simplest, most likely method of learning the minimum I need to know to create my own iPhone App?

Answer 1

If you have no programming experience, then creating a native iPhone application will be a daunting task. Developing for the iPhone is much like developing for the desktop mac, it's a very complete and mature system.

I'd honestly say, stick with doing a web-app for the iPhone. Mobile Safari makes available some special hooks which allow you to get "closer" to the system than a "regular" web-app would. And sometimes that's quite enough.

Answer 2

If you're really serious about it and are willing to put in some time to actually learn to program in Cocoa, the way I would do it would be a combination of reading all the stuff Apple has to offer along with a couple good books both for reference and more conceptual big picture/getting into the Cocoa mindset stuff.

If you just want to try to hack something together that works than you'll probably do best with a combination of Apple's sample code and lots of questions on various forums when you get stuck.

The books I would recommend would be Programming in Objective-C, by Stephen Kochan and Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, by Aaron Hillegass. The former is a good introduction to the Objective-C language itself, and the latter is pretty much the Cocoa book. It's not an iPhone specific book, but pretty much everything in it (especially the concepts and design patterns) still apply. Keep in mind you wont have access to the garbage collector on the iPhone. You should also be sure to read through Apple's own Introduction to The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language.

For actual code to look over and adapt to your own needs, it's hard to find anything better than Apple's own iPhone sample code library.

You might also try these two forums for any SDK questions you might have, as well as of course Stack Overflow for the more general stuff that doesn't fall under the NDA.