I’m going to use this time between jobs to learn how to program the iPhone. Since I’m already familiar with Cocoa development, I believe it is going to be fairly easy.
On Tuesday I picked up a copy of the “iPhone Application Development for Dummies” book by Neal Goldstein. I’m already on chapter 11. This book is great, especially for someone like me that already has some Cocoa experience. The coding information is minimal which would probably bother me if I wasn’t already familiar with Cocoa. But it is perfect in my case. It gets me right to what I need to know.
There are a couple example applications which are real applications that the author has submitted to the App Store. I’m going to customize the first for use on my own iPhone by including my picture in it, and making some other cosmetic changes.
The iPhone development environment is amazing. This reminds me of how things were when Microsoft first released Visual Basic. A big difference is that although simple applications can be very easily and quickly created and deployed (like VB) there is a professional strength language beneath it (Objective-C vs. Basic) which will allow full blown application development.
I am really loving this! Thank you God for giving me the time off to go learn this.