Having now gone through getting Habits built, tested and on the App Store, I wanted to share these tips on getting started with iPhone development:
- Go enroll in the iPhone developer program before you start. Yeah, I know — it’s 99 bucks. But if you have an idea and a reasonable chance of doing it, just take the plunge. I joined after I finished, and that caused a lot of delays — I could have been completing the other necessary steps in parallel.
- As soon as you’re in, go get your application contracts going. If you want to make paid applications, you have to give Apple your tax and bank information. Again, it takes some time to get approved, so start early.
- If you don’t know Objective-C — don’t worry, that’s the easy part. The primer on the iPhone developer site should be good enough if you know C/C++.
- For Cocoa Touch, I recommend Erica Sadun’s iPhone Developer’s Cookbook. The chapter on coverflow is worth the price of the book, but everything else is there too (navigation, touch, location, contacts, etc)
- I also highly recommend iCodeBlog. Once you have some basic knowledge of the framework, check out the to-do application tutorial.
Update: just found this great flowchart of the right order to do things