iPhone Development A Web Devs Perspective Ben Sandofsky - - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

iPhone Development

Ben Sandofsky - ben@sandofsky.com

A Web Dev’s Perspective

I’m Your Straight Man

• I’m a Ruby guy
• Put on ad-hoc

Yellowpages.com iPhone App Team

• Worked with the

SDK since Beta 1

The Platform

• You must use Objective-C (for now)
• Cocoa Touch is the Framework
• You must use Xcode

Objective-C

• A superset of C
• Message Based
• Static or Dynamic Typing

Syntax

[human say:@”Hello World” with:@”joy”];

• (void) say:(NSString *)message with:(NSString *)emotion;
• (void) say:(NSString *)message with:(NSString *)emotion

{ NSLog(@”He said %@ with great %@”, message, emotion); }

human.h human.m

What’s good?

• Introspection and Pseudo Metaprogramming
• Type safety is optional
• Clean Syntax

What’s bad?

• Rituals: header files, types required in

method signatures

• Message Verbosity
• Memory Management

Memory Management

• No Garbage Collector (yet)
• Retain/Release Model. (Leaks ahoy!)
• Auto-release Pools

The Framework

• OO Primitives: NSString, NSNumber, etc
• Heavy use of Delegates
• Model View Controller

Delegates

• Alternative to Subclassing
• Override Custom Behavior
• Leaner

Views

• Layers with subview
• Respond to Events

and send messages

• Pain to set by hand

Interface Builder

• Set views and wire

up events WYSIWYG

• “Freeze” it to a file

Conclusions

• There’s a reason iPhone Developers charge

$200 an hour.

• A lot of it is just “different,” but a lot of it is

just hard.

• It will get easier as hardware gets faster

iPhone Development

Ben Sandofsky - ben@sandofsky.com

A Web Dev’s Perspective