Matt and I biked back to my house after work and started our first evening of hacking together a sick iPhone App that we are really excited about. Who knows where this will lead, but the sure thing is that we are going to enjoy it, we are going to learn a lot, and we are going to see how well we work together when we are doing something for fun and in our own spare time. Pretty cool stuff.
We first made some sweeeeet pasta and had some coffee and white russians and got OSX Leopard installed on Matt's laptop. That took a while, so I brought my laptop over to the coffee table and we watched and hour or so of Apple iPhone Development tutorial videos. These are the Apple-supplied ones on iTunes University. They are reasonably good, and give a good general overview. The couple of more code-specific ones on iCodeBlog are a little more focused, but therefore are a little more direct and helpful for learning the syntax and code style, which is cool. After that we got the iPhone SDK installed, updated OSX again, and we were all set. It took a while to download all this stuff and so on, and install everything, but it was pretty straightforward otherwise. After all the installs, we were ready to try out some Sample Code!!
We downloaded the classic "Hello World" from the iPhone Developers page, and loaded it up in XCode, the dev environment on the Mac. Build... and Run... and BOOM!! It was running on the iPhone Simulator, a very well-integrated sort of Virtual Machine, which looks like an iPhone and allows you to test your program on the computer before sending it to an iPhone device to test it there. Good stuff!!!!!
We played around with the sample code, and then spent a good hour or two reading through a bunch of code, and discussing what each thing meant, it's counterpart in C++, and jumped back and forth to the Documentation and the Interface Builder to try to get a better handle on how everything fits together. Then we downloaded the multiple widget code from the Apple site too, and this is great because it gives an example of a ton of available widgets that you can use on the iPhone. Sweet.
Anyhoo, after about 7 hours, we decided to stop working at about 3am. A good first "day" of getting on the road towards our first Application. This is really, reaaaaaaaally exciting. I think however this goes, it's going to be fun and we're going to love doing this kinda stuff. Our main "goal" is to enjoy this, and make something we think is cool and that we are proud of. If we enjoy it, then we can continue development by setting up a Perforce or CVS account so we can both work on code separately and not have to work over each other's shoulder all the time. But that's for the 2nd App or 3rd App, or somewhere down the line. For now, we'll just figure all the details out together and hopefully we can get something cool done in a reasonable timeframe.
Matt getting OSX Leopard installed
Delving into the iPhone SDK!
Hard at work, late at night, and with the Pixar "A Bug's Life" Poster overlooking us with an Apple logo, and the slogan "Think Different." Exciting and awesome times.
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