Beginning iOS Programming
A couple of months ago I bought an iPad – one of the new ones, with the retina display. It’s really lovely. A toy, for sure; a luxury – but a good one to have for that. I’ve used it a lot – for all the things you’d expect like facebook, mail, twitter, listening to music (and Radio 4), etc. I’ve also read several books on it (the retina display is very very very easy on the eye), played a few games (particularly Myst, which I’d never played before, and the fascinating Cargo-Bot), and had fun with some music making apps (both NanoStudio and the Korg iMS-20 are good for a few hours’ dicking around at least – but I’m more seriously intrigued by the prospect of using it to to control Ableton Live, and I spent a good chunk of last Saturday exploring the options there).
So, yeah, it’s a shiny device and lots of exciting things are happening with it. That being so, I’d like to be able to program it, so I’m going to try to get into that now – and probably blog about it a bit here.
I was still running Snow Leopard on my MBP, and the latest XCode requires Lion, so I finally got round to upgrading yesterday (completely painless, should have done it ages ago). So now I can install the latest tools and get cracking.
To that end, I’m gathering materia:
- On my desk I’ve got the lab’s copy of Wei-Meng Lee’s Beginning iPad Application Development but it’s the 2010 edition, only goes up to iOS 3.2, and has poor reviews on Amazon, so I’m not very excited about that.
- I’ve ordered a copy of Mark et al’s Beginning iPhone 5 Development which looks much better and which I’ve heard good things about. It should arrive tomorrow, after which point I expect it’ll be my main resource for a while.
- For Objective C goodness I’ve also got Stephen Kochan’s Programming in Objective-C 2.0…
- … and my friend David Chisnall’s Cocoa Programming Developer’s Handbook which is full of clever stuff (some of which you might need to be Chisnall-clever to understand) – mainly Cocoa-specific but the boy knows his stuff and it’s definitely got some shiny tips.
- Frosty recommended DocSets to me, so I’ve got that installed on the iPad for handy second-screen reference.
Any other recommendations for stuff I should be looking at/using/reading/listening to/absorbing through my skin?