How to Develop iPhone Apps

Apple's app store is a place for apps not just for iPhones, but also for Apple iPad and other products from the company. With millions of Apple devices in use, the number of Apps that are required by their users continues to grow. From gaming, entertainment, news, social networks to such basic tasks as email, the users require apps for all of them.

Apps for iPhone and iPad

It should first be noted that both these devices have the same operating system or platform. This allows an app created for one to be run on the other too. Basically, for the purposes of app development, they can be considered to be same devices - except they are different in screen size and other factors such as the size of the keyboard. iPad has a larger keyboard than iPhone. So when designing an app, the GUI of both should be kept in mind.

The iPhone SDK

After June 2010, the original iPhone SDK is called iOS SDK, after Apple renamed the iPhone OS to iOS. The latest version of the SDK is 4.3, released on 3 March 2011.

You can use C, Objective C, C++ and JavaScript to develop apps for iPhone. Among these only the first three are allowed to link against documented API's, so practically these are the languages you will be writing the more complicated apps in.

The core components of the SDK consist of the following:

• Cocoa Touch This is the user interface library that supports touch support, accelerometer, camera etc.

• Media support The types of audio, visual and other media supported include audio mixing, OpenGL, different image file formats, ideo playback etc.

• Core Services These are the most basic services that are part of the iOS universe, including networking, support for threading, SQL database using SQLite etc

• OS X Kernel Services This provides support for the OS level services such as file system, power management, TCP/IP level development etc. The iOS kernel is based Mac OS, which in turn is derived in part from Unix.

The SDK is free to download by third party developers, though once you create an app, and wish to sell it on the App Store, you have to pay a fee to Apple, called the iPhone Developer Free Program, which is currently set at $99. With more than 10 billion apps having been sold by January 2011, developing apps for iPhones is a multi-billion dollar industry. And because the SDK is free to download, and there are a number of tutorials available online about how to get into the think of the iPhone app development, the possibilities are immense for any developer.