Chapter 1. Hello! iPhone
This chapter covers
- The Apple Developer website
- Installing the iPhone SDK
- Introduction to Xcode and Interface Builder
- Hello, World!
The iPhone is a fun and powerful phone, and no matter how many apps there are in the App Store, everyone has an idea for another one. It’s great that there’s finally a combination of a large market, a distribution model, and a way to get paid that makes it easy for hobbyist programmers to make a little money (or in some cases, a lot of money) with simple apps.
Look at iSteam. It’s an app that lets you steam up your phone with your breath and that squeaks when you run your finger across it, and it was written in seven days by firsttime iPhone programmers. It made $100,000 in its first three months in the App Store.
The last new platform that caused this much excitement was the web. Today, we have so many tools that can help us make websites without knowing any HTML that it’s hard to remember we used to have to know how to program to create even the simplest site.
But HTML is a nearly ideal way to get started with programming. Its structure looks like what you see in the browser, and you can create simple websites knowing just a few tags and using Notepad and a browser. And if you see a page you like, you can view its source and learn how it was done. This combination of simple coding, an easy on-ramp, cheap tools, and lots of available examples makes it possible for many people to learn to program in HTML.
