The first consideration when developing an iPhone app is the hardware. And it basically boils down to two devices:

• a Mac
• an iPhone (or iPod touch)

As I mentioned before, I had never owned a Mac and I didn’t own an iPhone when I first became interested in writing an app for it so this was a bit of an expensive proposition. My advice? Try hitting up your friends who have more disposable income than you do. I’m married (no kids but single income), living in the Bay Area, and paying off a mortgage so my disposable income is close to zero. Oh yeah, good times… But fortunately, I’m in a techy kind of industry and I know lots of people who love their gadgets. Some of them even have spare laptops and phones.

About the computer: be sure you get an Intel Mac. Yes, it’s theoretically possible to get the SDK running on a PowerPC Mac but I tried it and I wouldn’t advise it unless you just want to see what the SDK looks like. I was able to get the SDK to compile my applications on a PPC Mac but after beta 5 or so, my apps stopped running on the simulator. Maybe I didn’t set all the configurations right, maybe my machine was a bit flakey, or maybe it was the OpenGL stuff I was doing. But trust me, there are enough challenges to programming for the iPhone that you really don’t need to add this one.

About the iPhone (or iPod Touch): you actually don’t need one, at least for a while. Yes, you’ll need it to test out things with the accelerometer, camera, etc. But otherwise, the simulator is very good. If you don’t have an iPhone but you’ve already got the Intel Mac, I suggest downloading the SDK and just trying it out. The simulator is good enough to give you a sense of what your final app will be like.

In the next post, I’ll talk about software issues.

So, you’re thinking about developing for the iPhone. Great! It’s lots of fun and very rewarding to see your own little program running on an iPhone. There are plenty of tutorials out there but I thought it might be useful to talk about my own experiences.

I have a fairly technical background, mostly in computer graphics. I’ve programmed in C++, used Open GL, and even wrote a couple apps for my Palm OS device back in the day. When I started this project, however, I had never owned a Mac, programmed in Objective C, or even owned an iPhone. But I managed to get a simple version of my dice rolling app up and running after several weekends.

I’ll go into various aspects of my experiences, starting with hardware concerns in the next post.

I know I’ve only barely started with this whole iPhone thing, but I wanted to take the time to thank three friends without whom I wouldn’t be doing this now:

• Bena, who gave me a really great deal on her old MacBook Pro. This is the first Mac I’ve owned and without it, iPhone app development would have been pretty tricky.
• Josh Qualtieri, who gave me his old iPhone when he upgraded to the new 3G. Yeah, I know … pretty sweet, eh? In return, he just wants me to develop a good game for his phone. I guess that’ll be the next project.
• Josh Anon, who helped me with general iPhone development stuff. He’s much more experienced in writing for the Mac OS (in that he actually has experience). Check out his FlipBook application.

I’d also like to thank my brother Paul who lent me his Power PC MacBook. It was good starting with that, but unfortunately the dev kit doesn’t work so great with PPC machines. I’m also indebted to my friends Matt Webb and Mike Fu who have provided moral support for general iPhone stuff. And of course, I’d like to thank my wife, Tracy, who provides constant support and critical analysis like, “Those graphics suck!”. No, just kidding. She never says stuff like that! She just thinks it. But that’s okay, it keeps me humble.

So, I’ve decided to join the 21st century and create a website. I started developing a dice rolling application for the iPhone and I need a place to point to.

Someday, I’d like to fill this site with a few more apps and maybe even a comic. But first thing’s first, better make a decent WordPress theme for this site.