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WITH THE INTRODUCTION OF THE IPHONE, Apple revolutionized the mobile computing market. The
iPhone transformed the mobile phone from a device that you could use to make calls, check e-mail,
and look up movie times into a computer that could run almost any type of application. Since the
iPhone’s release in 2007, developers have written over 700,000 applications that run on iOS devices.
These apps encompass many categories, including games, utilities, social networking, reference,
navigation, and business, among many others.
The trend in the fi eld of computing is moving toward mobility and mobile platforms, like the
iPhone and iPad, and away from a desktop-based environment. Particularly in business and corporate
environments, decision makers want convenient, 24-hour access to their data. The iPhone
and iPad are ideal platforms for mobile computing because of their form factor and extensive set
of libraries and APIs.
Although there are many terrifi c books about iOS software development on the market, I couldn't
fi nd one geared specifi cally toward the enterprise developer that needs to mobilize corporate data or
business applications. My original goal for this book was to present these developers with the information
that they would need to be able to get enterprise data from a back offi ce server, display and
manipulate that data on a mobile device, and then get the appropriate information back into their
corporate information system.
As I worked through writing the book, it became clear that the tools and techniques that I cover in
the book are applicable to many classes of applications in addition to the business use case I had in
mind when I started. Developers of any type of application that needs to store data on iOS will certainly
be interested in the extensive coverage of the Core Data API. Any developer attempting to send
data to an external web service such as Facebook or Twitter can benefi t from the section of the book
dealing with XML and web services. Many applications need to display data using tables, which I
also cover in detail. Finally, all iOS applications have a user interface, and I cover building user interfaces
using storyboards. Even though my original goal was to write a book for enterprise developers,
I believe I have written one that is useful when developing applications of just about any type. |
