Software Testing Blog

In the past few months, we’ve been providing QA services on a bunch of mobile apps.  As a result, we’ve had the good fortune of meeting some really cool, creative entrepreneurs and developers who are building top-shelf apps for the iPhone, Blackberry, G1 and others.

So I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for articles from leading mobile app entrepreneurs.  And while perusing Alley Insider, I came across an article from Dan Frommer.  Frommer highlights a fantastic first-hand account from mobile app veteran Craig Hockenberry, maker of iPhone hits such as Twitterrific and Frenzic.

Hockenberry’s 2,000 word piece is a must-read for aspiring iPhone app developers.  Frommer was kind enough to summarize it as follows:

- Learn how to develop Web pages for Mobile Safari so you know how to think about designing apps for a mobile device.
- Buy a Mac. You can’t make iPhone apps from a PC.
- Sign up for Apple’s developer program.
- Watch the “getting started” videos in the iPhone dev center.
- Goof around with some of the sample code on Apple’s site.
- Check out a few of the better iPhone coding books.
- Read up on a few of Craig’s old posts.
- Go for it!

In particular, Hockenberry mentions a few books iPhone app dev books:

If you’re just starting out, I’d highly recommend Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche. The best thing about this book is the step-by-step approach it takes to working with Xcode, Objective-C and the iPhone APIs. They’ll lead you through the basics and you’ll be building your own apps in no time at all.

As you get more comfortable with the tools and AppKit/UIKit frameworks, I’d recommend you take a look at Erica Sadun’s iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK. This book presumes a bit more knowledge about the SDK, but is a very handy reference both to the official and unofficial APIs.

Since you’re going to be working with Cocoa Touch on the iPhone, you’ll also want to start thinking like a Cocoa programmer. Every great iPhone and Mac developer has nothing but wonderful things to say about Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass.

If you have previous development experience with C, C++ or Java, you’ll want to read this mailing list post by Erik Buck that enumerates some of the difficulties that you’ll have coming up to speed with Objective-C and Cocoa.

As we come across more of these practical, hands-on resources, we’ll share them here.  If you know of other helpful articles or posts, please send them our way.  For you future mobile mavens, I hope some of these resources are helpful.