About iPhone App Development Essentials

The iPhone and its peers in the smartphone market are remarkable technological achievements. In a device small enough to put in your pocket the iPhone can make phone calls, send and receive email, SMS and MMS messages, stream and play audio and video, detect movement and rotation, vibrate, adapt the display brightness based on the ambient lighting, surf the internet, run apps from a selection of hundreds of thousands, take high resolution photos, record video, tell you your exact location, provide directions to your chosen destination, play graphics intensive games and even detect when you put the device to your ear.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the iPhone is that all of these capabilities and hardware features are available to you as an app developer. In fact, once you have an iPhone, an Intel-based Mac computer, the iPhone SDK, a copy of the Xcode development environment and the necessary skills, the only limit to the types of apps you can create is your own imagination (and, of course, the restrictions placed on apps accepted into the Apple App Store).

The aim of this book is to teach you the skills necessary to build your own apps for the iPhone and both the iPhone SDK and Xcode can be downloaded for free. Assuming you have an Intel-based Mac (sadly this book does not include one) and some ideas for some apps to develop, you are ready to get started.