Preface

We’ve both been Apple fans for most of our lives. Shannon fondly recalls early games played on the Apple II and that first Macintosh, which really turned his school newspaper around. Christopher turned his own fandom into a real business with his first entrepreneurial venture, Dreams of the Phoenix, a Mac software company.

Thus, we both had high hopes when we heard rumors of an upcoming iPhone. After the doldrums of the 1990s, Apple was on an upswing, and we were thrilled. We’d already seen how the Apple Airport had revolutionized local area network access and how the Apple iPod had removed the once ubiquitous Sony Walkman from the audio landscape with one fell swoop. We hoped that the iPhone would do the same for the cell phone industry.

It was Christopher who stood in line on that late June afternoon in 2007, purchasing one of the 270,000 iPhones sold in those first 30 hours. Despite being a lifelong techie, Shannon had never owned a cell phone before the iPhone, but he got his on June 29 too, and since then it’s been his constant companion. (He’s still more likely to look up a map while on a long bike ride than he is to make a call, but that’s part of the beauty of the device—it’s many things for many different people.)

We’re programmers, so after we had our iPhones in hand, the next step was to program for them. We both came into this world of iPhone programming through the web.

For Christopher, that’s because on June 30, 2007, there was no other way to develop for the iPhone. During that initial nine-month gestation period, any iPhone application had to go through the web. Christopher was on the cutting edge. He set up the iPhoneWebDev mailing list, where people puzzled out viewports and other special iPhone features, and he quickly learned how to create great-looking apps for this new platform. He was a participant in the first two iPhoneDevCamps and a judge in the Hackathon.

For Shannon, web programming was an obvious first step because he was already programming popular web sites at www.rpg.net and www.xenagia.net, and he wanted to see what it would take to optimize them for his new iPhone. With the results in hand, he did his first writing about the iPhone—a pair of articles on designing web pages for the iPhone, which can still be found at www.iphonewebdev.com/blog.

When we first pitched this book, it was all about iPhone web development, our initial expertise. But in the middle of our pitch, in March of 2008, Apple announced a whole new method of programming for the iPhone: the SDK. We scrambled to revise our outline at once.

We could have thrown out web development entirely and just moved on to the SDK. Many programmers and authors seem to be doing exactly that. And we think that’s a big mistake. Web development and the SDK each offer distinct ways of programming for the iPhone. They also each offer distinct advantages.

Want to simply monetize your program without worrying about anything else? In that case, the SDK is probably for you. But, if you want to rapidly deploy your program, frequently update it, interact with other users on the Internet, or take advantage of an existing web infrastructure, you might find that web development is the way to go.

Then there’s the possibility of hybridization. If nothing else, you probably want to make great iPhone-optimized web pages to talk about your SDK programs—but we also think there are much deeper options for hybridization.

This concept of there being two paths of iPhone development eventually became a cornerstone of our book. Although we have more material on the SDK, we’ve written a complete introduction to both topics, offering everything that you need to get started in either type of programming. This comprehensive look at iPhone programming methods and our introductory style are what we think makes this book unique. We now welcome you to join us, as we share with you the many lessons we’ve learned since the iPhone’s release, a year and a half ago.