I’m a big fan of the iPhone and forever downloading apps and spending stupid amounts of money in iTunes. For the last few months I’ve been very keen to progress my own personal development knowledge of the SDK Apple released to create iPhone applications. I’ve got an Apple Mac and I’m forever downloading development tools from the Apple website.

The big stumbling block is that I know nothing about Object C or Cocoa the Apple object-oriented application program environment for Mac OS X. I’m a keen programmer and have developed in Java however it just seemed to be a bit of a hurdle in the short term.

That was until one of my clients approached me to request a new iPhone application to aggregate their news content through an XML feed. I found that there are a lot of tools readily available for this sort of iPhone application development.

So I made a list of useful iPhone application related development notes from my own research which might be useful.

1. Buy a Mac
Ok pretty obvious I know but it doesn’t need to be a super top spec Mac. An old Macbook Pro will do or the Mac minis are priced at £499.00 which is a reasonable investment.

2. Download the SDK and a IDE
Apple gives you the software development kit for free for iPhone development. This includes the development environment as well called Xcode. You also get an iPhone simulator for testing as well as interface builders and a full documented reference library.

3. Plan out your Application
Now you have the tools you need to visualize how the application will look and interact. There are some great tools out to help with this as well including, Yahoo Design Stencil Kit. This is part of the Yahoo UI Kit and is an excellent resource for user interface design visualization. There is also Geoff Teehans iPhone GUI which is a Photoshop file that has a fairly comprehensive library of assets.

4. Start Developing
You don’t need to download the Apple SDK there are plenty of other tools to develop iPhone websites. iUI allows you to create iPhone interfaces with minimal knowledge of JavaScript. It is intended to mimic the look and feel of the iPhone on web pages. jQuery plug-in for the iPhone is a lightweight and powerful JavaScript library which helps put together an iPhone centric web app.

5. Hello I actually want to develop apps using Object C
If you want to create those money spinner apps then using the Apple developer tools is the way forward. An IDE that is bundle with the tools is Dashcode and is a development environment that was used to originally create web apps. It has a number of templates that you can use to start building your apps.

6. I’ve finished my app!
Late nights and plenty of coffee and you have a nice new shiny app. To get it on the iTunes store you first need to register for the iPhone Developer Program which costs $99.00. This also allows you to submit your app to the store which usually takes a couple of weeks.

Hopefully I will soon have my own first application developed in the forthcoming weeks but if you can think of any more useful information for iPhone development please let me know.