‘

Part 1 – Learning iOS Programming

Learning to program the iPhone & iPad has never been easier due to some fabulous books. Programmers who are new to Apple have to learn Apple’s Cocoa Touch SDK and in most cases will be learning Objective-C as a new programming language too. Of the 21 iphone programming books I’ve read, here are the best…

I recommend you start with Beginning iPhone 3 Development – Exploring the iPhone SDK (soon to be updated to ‘Beginning iPhone 4 Development‘). Jeff LaMarche and Dave Mark clearly introduce and explain the most important topics to get new iOS developers over the initial steep learning curve. Of all the iPhone books this remains the best for developers new to iOS. They have a companion book ‘More iPhone 3 Development’, but you won’t need that unless you later want to delve into advanced topics.

Another great book for learning iOS programming is iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Joe Conway and Aaron Hillegass. This books is written by the premier iOS and Mac training company in the world. It covers more topics than Beginning iPhone 3 Development, but it still starts out slow and easy, has a lot of great explanations of ‘good ways to do it’ and it includes introductions to Apples iOS development tools too, so you get a very well rounded kick start on the platform. Because it covers so many topics it makes a good reference later for stuff you forget.

If you like books with lots of text to explain stuff, you should start with ‘Beginning iPhone 3 Development’ if you hate lots of text and really just prefer short lessons on ‘how to do it on iOS’ then start with the Big Nerd Ranch book. But people, this stuff is really difficult when you first start, so its worth having both so you can hear two different voices when you get stuck.

Once you start writing your first app you’ll find there are lots of little specific things to figure out, your best bet is to check with Erica Sadun first by looking in the pages of her wonderful book ‘The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook’. Its a great companion for any iOS developer, and its the one book I refer back to most often.

Programming for iPhone means programming in Objective-C. Objective-C is the C language, with dynamic object oriented extensions. Coming from any other language, you’ll need to learn the Objective-C way, and for that you should check out ‘Learn Objective-C on the Mac‘, though there are a bunch of newer Objective-C books I’ve not seen (if you find one you love, let me know). Also consider adding ‘Programming in Objective-C‘ by Steve Kochan to your library, as this is the comprehensive language reference, it will have the answer when you are trying to figure out more complicated parts of the language. Some of the more advanced parts of iOS development, eg audio processing, are done in C rather than Objective-C. This means that when you get to those you’ll need to understand the crazy C stuff of pointers to pointers to functions returning references to arrays of pointers to alloced memory buffers… If all those stars and ampersands get you down you should go back to an easy learning C book, of which there are many, eg ‘Learn C on the Mac‘.

More book recommendations:  App Design, Games & Unity, Marketing & Business.

Suzanne Ginsburg’s ‘Designing the iPhone User Experience‘ is another worthy read. Its 277 pages cover iPhone apps from the point of view of a UI specialist and includes tons of good advice about market research by, prototyping, testing, how to approach the overall app design, UI design, and branding. On my first look through I feared it was another manual of ‘how the pros do it’ that would not suit the resources of my own two person company, but on closer inspection that’s not the case at all. When the author does explain bigger budget approaches she also explains low budget ‘guerilla’ methods. There are tips and anecdotes throughout the book drawn from Susanne’s experience working on iPhone app design and UI testing. (Suzanne is an acomplished user experience consultant in Silicon Valley.)

One piece of advice about listening to designers… They have a lot to say about things you should do, and stuff you should put into you app. All those ‘shoulds’ are scary to an indie software developer short on time and money and focused mainly on writing code. Think of all the ‘shoulds’ as a menu of stuff you can consider, and then spend your time and money where it makes sense for you. Remember though, end users don’t care one bit how costly or time consuming an app is, they only care how delightful, fun, and useful the app is, and your app is going to be competing against apps that have had a lot of careful design put into them.

For those of you who can’t get enough I’d like to recommend a couple more design books, though they are not iPhone books. ‘The Design of Everyday Things‘by D Norman is an industrial design classic. As the iPone is a device you hold and touch, the app design direction of physical / real world metaphor has proved very successful for a number of apps, and Norman’s book is probably the best design guidance you will find for that kind of app.

‘Don’t Make Me Think‘ is a concise and accessible book on web usability design, it has some great lessons that iPhone designers can use too that might be a little easier to learn when seen in the context of the more familiar web.

Finally a quick mention of ‘Design Basics Index‘ by Jim Krause, which is a useful intro and reference for graphic design concepts that’s helpful to those of us without training in graphic design.

More book recommendations: iOS Programming, Games & Unity, Marketing & Business.

• Faster CPUs and hyperthreading, so CPU bound Xcode builds gets to run 4 parallel compiles at the same time for a big speed boost.
• The SSD has blazing random access times thus speeding up all general use of the machine, including the compile-deploy-test cycle with Xcode and the iPhone simulator.
• More screen space makes it easier to work with Xcode and the iPhone & iPad simulator on the road.
• The machine can better keep up with demanding Instruments profiling.

Simple Benchmarks

Here are some simple stopwatch based benchmarks comparing new and old machines. Its much snappier all round, and definitely speedier for development work.

High-res Display

The high-res display gives more pixels within the same space, so GUI elements take up less space and fonts draw smaller. This means Xcode and the simulator fit on the high res display. For me they didn’t quite fit right on the normal display, so I always found myself re-arranging windows when working out of my office (where I have a 27″ desktop display). You can see this in the two screen shots below, the first from the old macbook and below that the new high-res macbook. I boosted the font for code from Monaco-12 on old macbook (also great on my desktop display) to Monaco-14 to get the same sized text on the high res macbook display. I might settle on a 12 or 13 though because the new screen is much clearer than the old one. Fortunately Xcode makes it easy to change font sizes for code so switching between 12pt for desktop and 14pt when on the road shouldn’t be an annoyance.

Open-GL on Simulator

I was hoping that the faster CPUs would boost performance of the iPad simulator running OpenGL. OpenGL on the simulator has terrible performance, I guess this is because the simulator is doing all its graphics with CPU based emulation of the graphics hardware on the phones, or maybe it just doesn’t use real graphics hardware on the macbook. On the one hand thats fine for performance work because performance work of course has to be done on real devices. However for general game and graphics logic development it means that running the game on the simulator (especially in iPad mode) means that frame rates are really low, lower than a generation 1 iPhone. The new macbook didn’t really help much here, OpenGL on the simulator still pegs one CPU on the macbook, and frame rates really didn’t improve much.

Xbench Tests

My video lessons: Basics of iPhone Memory Management.

Books

• Learn Objective-C on the Mac
• Cocoa Programming for Mac
• Programming in Objective-C

Online

• Practical Memory Management from Apple
• Memory Management Guide from Apple
• Dr Dobbs
• Open Kosmaczewski
• Mac Developer Tips
• Memo.tv
• mauvilasoftware.com
• Stepwise.com
• Tristan O’Tierney
• Mac Developer Network Video
• O’Reilly and here
• Cocoa Dev Central
• Cocoa Dev
• HyperJeff’s list of resources
• WikiBooks
• Devplace
• Woojijuice
• Peter Dikant

Top 100 lists.

Apple tracks the popularity of apps and ranks them in lists of top 100 apps. These are the ‘Top Paid’ and ‘Top Free’ lists you see when you browse the app store. The exact method is known only to Apple, but it seems that Apple measures app popularity by unit downloads over the last day, perhaps using a weighted method where downloads from previous days have a decaying influence on ranking. There are many ways that customers can find apps, eg searching iTunes, Google search, app review websites, word or mouth, ads in other apps, etc, but it’s clear that browsing the top 100 lists in the app store is very important app discovery method. Several developers have reported greatly increased sales when an app is in a top 100 list, and greatly reduced sales when their app slips off the bottom of a top 100 list. The two most important top 100 lists are top 100 paid apps and top 100 free apps, and then there are top 100 free and top 100 paid lists for each category and subcategory of games. In addition to the top 100 lists there are listings of apps by release date. Every one of these lists is maintained independently for every iTunes country, so an app that’s very popular in one country and in several top 100 lists for that country might be totally missing from the top 100 lists in other countries.

Browsing the App Store on the iPhone or iPod touch

The app store app on the iPhone or iPod touch opens to the last application tab that you were using: Featured, Categories, Top 25, Search, or Updates. On the top 25 tab you can see either the free or paid top 25 apps, selecting free or paid with the toolbar at the top. When if first opens it will default to whichever of free or paid you were looking at last. 5 apps fit on the screen at once, so in fact to begin with you see top 5. Scrolling down through 5 screens worth gets you the whole top 25. At the bottom of the table is a link to ‘Show top 50′, taping this gets 25 more apps added to the table, so you can scroll through the top 50 free or paid. At the end of 50 there’s no link to see more, so on the device you can’t see the entire top 100 overall apps, only the top 50.

Via the Categories tab you can browse the top 100 paid and free lists for each category. Tapping on a particular category opens that categories top paid list as a table. The table has 25 apps listed, and at the bottom is a link ‘Twenty Five More…’. You can use that 3 times to get the table to show the full top 100 list. The toolbar at the top of the table switches between the top paid, top free, and listing apps by release date. Note that the table always opens showing the top paid list when you go into a category, it doesn’t remember if you were last viewing top paid, top free, or by release date. Note that this is different to iTunes on the desktop, which defaults its category view to release date. When viewing by release date, you can keep tapping the ‘Twenty Five More…’ link and get up to 350 apps listed.

Browsing in iTunes on the Desktop

In the App Store page in iTunes, the middle of the screen is full of special areas ‘New and Noteworthy’, ‘What’s Hot’ etc that the iTunes editorial team uses to promote apps it has hand picked. The overall top 10 paid apps is shown in the right column, and underneath that the overall top 10 free apps. (Note how paid gets billing over free, though headline billing is in the hand picked areas in the middle, which can include paid and free). Clicking on one of the top 100 links goes to a page that shows all top on screen.

On the left side of the main app store screen is the list of categories. Clicking on a category goes to thats categories app listing (screen shot below). When this page opens it lists the apps by release date. So here’s why the app release date is important – release date is the default view of an app store category in iTunes on the desktop. It’s possible to manipulate the release date during an app update to get an old app back onto this page. The first 20 apps are show, and you can page through all of them 20 at a time. The app listing can be changed to sort by most popular or by name. Sorting by most popular shows a popularity ranked list for free and paid apps combined. It’s interesting to see which paid apps show up in this list competing with the free apps in that category.

On the left and right side, the top 20 paid and top 20 free apps for this category are shown, and there are links to go to the full top 100 list for each. The top 100 lists show 100 apps, and there is no paging to get to apps 101-200.

Tools to examine Rankings

As a seller of apps, its important to keep an eye on the rankings of your app, your competitors apps, and different apps in order to understand your market. Using iTunes to find apps rankings is laborious, especially because the rankings are different for each country. There are a couple of wonderful tools I use to help. MajicRank will connect to the iTunes servers for you and find the current rankings of any apps you’ve configured in it, and it will do that for every country or just the ‘big 8′ countries. What it doesn’t do is remember your rankings and chart them over time, though the developer is working on this. MajicRank uses the individual category top 100 ranking lists for each country.

Mobclix tracks all apps rankings over time, and over on their website you can get ranking history charts for free. What Mobclix is charting is the free and paid combined popularity that you can see in a category in iTunes USA. So if you use Mobclix and MajicRank together, the rankings won’t match because they show ranking in different lists.