Yes, I’ve done it. I bought a Mac. A Mac Mini to be precise. I have thought about buying one for quite a while, more than a year. The reasons for buying one before were that they are small, quiet and Unix compliant but now I also realized I want to develop applications for IPhone and for doing that I need two things:
- An Intel Mac
- An IPhone or IPod Touch
Let’s say that the time I was thinking of buying one was really saving up to to buy one. Money yes, but reasons as well. So, now there was nothing to hesitate about really, enough saving!
I went for the cheapest possible route though, the £399 1.83GHz Mac Mini and the 8GB IPod Touch. It happens rarely that I go for the absolute cheapest option but in this case I like to think it was wise, both are good enough and I am stepping out on for me unknown territory. I don’t see what can possibly go wrong but I thought that it would be unwise to buy a Mac Pro(starting at £1,749.00) and then realize I hate Mac.
So far, having been a Mac user for a few days I can say that in general, I like it! Best of all is the almost unreal feeling I get from not hearing the machine at all!
Ok, with hardware sorted what else do I need to develop IPhone apps? Apple - to no surprise - has made it really easy to get going. The SDK together with an IDE called XCode, an IPhone simulator and other tools are included in a bundle which is available after a free registration here.
I have it all set up, next steps are:
- Learning Objective-C, the programming language to use for developing on Mac platforms
- Learning the APIs, not by heart but get a feel for how it’s organized and used
- Learning the Tools
Apple’s IPhone Dev Center is of course the number one resource but other places to look for help are forums. The ones I have found so far are:
I’ll let you know how it goes.
