| Getting started with iPhone application development is relatively easy thanks to online tutorials and especially to books like Beginning iPhone Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche. But sometimes, software is just hard.
A year and a half after receiving an iPhone as a birthday present, I am still amazed. It looks so simple and it’s so easy to use, but behind it all is a world of complexity.
Apple has worked very hard to document the myriad APIs that make up the iPhone SDK and to provide sample code, but for some of us it’s still not enough. Even Apple cannot afford to provide a chapter’s worth of explanation for each sample application. Their tutorials can be quite helpful, such as the one on Core Data, but what then?
Enter iPhone Advanced Projects.
Ray Kiddy, who worked at Apple for 15 years in various roles, uses Apple’s tutorial on Core Data as a starting point and builds from there. More than providing just an introduction, Ray shows what it’s like to use Core Data in the real world.
That’s the difference between documentation and a book such as this. Of course, it doesn’t stop there.
Joachim Bondo, creator of the much-lauded chess application Deep Green, shares his advice and techniques for implementing correspondence gaming.
Noel Llopis, a ten-year veteran of the gaming industry, author of C++ for Game Programmers, and instructor of a two-day intensive class in OpenGL programming specifically for the iPhone, lends new meaning to making your application “shine” with a discussion of reflections and environment mapping in OpenGL. I found it to be a fascinating topic.
My knowledge of OpenGL is casual at best, but Ben Britten Smith provides such a clear explanation of particle systems (think smoke and fire) that this was not a hindrance at all. The chapter really was a “blast” to work through.
I’ve been on a private mailing list with Jonathan Saggau for several years now, and his explanations never fail to impress. Here, he discusses the difficult topic of improving interface responsiveness. (Be sure to have a copy of his sample code handy!)
And that’s just the half of it! The projects also include an exploration into Core Audio, a framework for persisting data with SQLite, strategies for networking, techniques for debugging, the Apple Push Notification Service (not for the faint of heart), and intelligent in-app e-mail.
Sometimes, software is hard. With these authors as your guides, it should make your work quite a bit easier. |
