I finally decided to pay my cash and join the iPhone developer program. It’s a fair amount of cash, but I thought that I’d take the plunge and thought that it might give me more of a push to actually create applications for the iPhone. Also, it means I can compile applications and put them onto my iPod Touch!

So I’ve managed to get my current development application up and running on my iPod. It’s called ipCalc and it’s designed for network admins who constantly use the command line tool, ipcalc, to find various bits of information about the subnet they’re working on. The maths behind the code is pretty straightforward, but hard enough that it gave me some design issues to overcome. But it’s now looking pretty good and I’ve been cleaning up the code with the aim to (hopefully) submit it to the iTunes App Store. It would be absolutely awesome to get something on the App Store!

Also, here’s 3 screenshots from my app actually running on my iPod Touch – yay!

I’ve been hard at work recently developing my iPhone application called ipCalc. It’s probably not an application that most people are going to want to use, but it has fairly simple logic behind it so I decided that it would be a good way to learn about the iPhone SDK. So far I’ve managed to learn Objective-C and I can safely say that I really do like it, and I’ve also managed to get my head around programming GUI applications which is so very different to command line applications as there’s so much more to think about.

Apple have made it so that you have to pay $99 in order to get a license to test application on an actual device (for me, my iPod Touch) and to submit applications to the App Store. I seem to have managed to apply to this program, but my application is currently pending. I hope that I manage to get accepted because then I will decide what to do with my ipCalc application… I will have to think about whether or not I want to charge for it – although my first thoughts are that this application will be free.

So, I’ll continue to improve the application and I might even release some tutorials on here about my experiences with the iPhone SDK as I have definitely found other tutorials that are out there very useful!

First Attempt	Current Version

Recently I have been learning the programming language Objective-C with the view to creating native Mac OS X programs. I bought the book “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” which was a brilliant read and had excellent examples to work through – I’d certainly recommend it to anyone thinking about learning about Cocoa.

I found it hard to get into the mindset of programming using objects (which are all pointers) rather than the usual C/C++ way where you work primarily with data types. But it’s all started to fall into place and I think I have got to grips with it now.

My next step is to create a program which is actually useful! Not sure what I’ll create yet, so keep an eye out!

[Please see my new iPhone apps page]

Last week I decided to give iPhone programming a try after having download the iPhone SDK a while back. I started to get frustrated with Objective-C because it’s quite a lot different to my old friend, C++ and so I had problems getting into it. In order to learn, I decided to set a challenge of creating an IP calculator program (something which there are only non-free ones of in the App Store).

I managed to get quite far with the programming and had the software displaying a reasonable GUI which seemed to be pretty good, but I was struggling to work out where to put code and exactly what I should be doing about calling functions on objects (quite different in Objective-C compared to C/C++). Feeling a bit depressed by not being able to understand the code I decided to buy Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X which had very good reviews.

The book arrived today, and I read a few chapters and managed to actually finish the first version of my software! Woo! So, I am now an iPhone application developer… apparently… Hopefully I’ll keep creating better things and improving on this very crude first version.

(Unfortunately I can’t test on my iPod Touch yet as I don’t have a license to install on real devices – it costs $99!)