I would like to make an iPhone app that is really pretty basic, but it doesn't seem to be made already. How hard is it to do?

also, does anyone on here have a 3G iPhone for sale? i have the 2G and am looking to upgrade.....

If you have a Mac, you can register for free and download the XCode with an iPhone emulator included at http://developer.apple.com/. They also have several basic program examples and tutorials that should help you decide if it would be easy enough to make your app. If you do decide to do it, you then need to pay $99 to get a developer certificate and the ability to distribute the app to actual phones.

With no knowledge of Mac programming, I took one of their example apps as a base and made a small utility program for work in about half a day, including the time it took to figure out the certificates and provisioning setup.

And you might want to hold off on the 3G upgrade. Popular rumors are pointing to a new iPhone announcement in June again, and even if the new model doesn't interest you, the market will probably be full of cheep used 3G phones at that point.

In order to make iPhone apps, you need an Intel Macintosh computer with the latest OSX operating system, the Apple iPhone developer's kit (it's a free download but it's a large file), and the ability to write computer code in (I believe) a variant of the "C" programming language.

Once you have all of the above in place, to get a basic application functioning is very easy. Whether or not your idea will be easy to implement depends entirely upon exactly what that idea is. Some computer programs are easy to write, others are hard.

I wonder how one actually gets to test an iPhone app that one has developed? Outside of the simulator, that is.

I suppose they must have some way for a developer to put their app onto a real iPhone for testing, without first uploading to the app store?

Or no?

If I remember correctly, I believe that's where they draw the line between "free SDK" and "subscription to developer program".

With the former, you just get the simulator. With the latter, you can upload to an actual iPhone to test.

Not sure exactly what the terms are. I could have sworn I heard someone say something about "90 dollars" in reference to that.

Ah, it's 99 dollars.

Do you know C?

Not that I've done any development, but I think that this is the idea behind "jailbreaking" one's Iphone: on a jailbroken phone you can add your own, or other people's, applications without going through all the signing and/or the App Store. Of course, if this is to be an application that you intend to charge money for, the App Store makes the charging side very easy, plus it increases your target market by including owners who haven't jailbroken their phones.

Peter

Yes, that's one of the advantages of jailbreaking an iPhone: You can install (or test) any apps you want instead of going through Apple's hoops.

If I were doing development, I'd just pay the 99 dollars. I still want to do development, but I need an Intel Mac first.

Mmm.. not clear on this, but it looks like that's $99 every year.

-ml

The free download only allows you to run the code in the simulator. Paying the $99 grants you a development certificate that is used to sign code, be it debug or release. You then add device UIDs to the certificate and are granted a provisioning profile. This profile can include up to 100 UIDs allowing the app to be distributed to 100 iPhones/iPod touches for testing and development. For a person who doesn't have XCode, they can drag the compiled app and profile into iTunes to send it to their iPhone, without using the App Store.

Cool. And do all of those stop working when the certificate expires (after one year?)?

Not complaining here, mind you. Just curious.

Appears so.

Yes. However the profile appears to be valid one year after creation. So theoretically I could make a change that generates a new profile one day before the certificate expired and run the app for another year. I just wouldn't be able to sign a new app or renew the signing on an existing one.

At this point, noone has had their developer certificate expire. People let into the beta last year had their first year extended to sometime in June.

And as others have said, this is all only necessary if you want to develop or release an app the Apple way. The jailbreaking community has kept up for the most part, and it opens up more then Apple currently exposes. Though at the expense of instability and other issues due to the prodding in the dark.

So all the apps I've downloaded to my touch (free and paid for) will continue to work even if the people who made them no longer carry on paying their $99 a year?

I haven't published an app to the retail store yet, but I would assume they keep working no matter what. The developer would just be unable to release new versions of the app.

The release apps appear to be wrapped in the Freeplay DRM, and are not provisioned with profiles the same way in development apps are.

Check out this. Or more directly.

Thanks! specifically, I was looking to possibly make an iPhone app that would natively look similar to Listingly.com I contacted the maker of the website to see if he was making one, but he said that he just hadn't had time to make it. Has anyone seen anything similar (regarding the black with white lettering look?)

Safari Books Online added a book called 'Beginning iPhone Development Exploring the iPhone SDK' yesterday. Might be worth browsing through if you have access to it.


Edit: I guess it was added on Tuesday.

There are a billion list-making applications out there for the iPhone. If you wanted to make one, you'd have a lot of stiff competition.

My favorite was Jott until they changed it to a subscription-only service. I understand their need to make money, though, and I keep teetering on the edge of actually paying for it.

For an app as simple and common as the one i would want to make, I wasn't looking to get money from it....i just want to use it ....i think other people would like it too though....

Don't let the fact that there are possibly dozens of similar/same apps as one you might think of creating. There will always be a market for something that's better or different because there are people with different tastes.

I have tried a bunch of apps that sound like they'll be amazing but then turn out to just fall short of the mark.

Fortunately for Developers, Apple has left a lot of room because all (I do mean ALL) of their default apps suck complete trash. That is, as long as they don't start denying apps that compete with theirs again.

Now hopefully iPhone OS 3 will give us a way to hide items from the spring board. Then I can get rid of half of the useless "apps" Apple builds in, even if only to prevent seeing them listed. Then I hope we see some quality replacement applications, such as a music player - the iPod app is so so so bad it's not even mildly humorous.

That player has no way to delete a file while on the go. I have a file that stutters that needs to be deleted. I never can remember to do it while I have the change... Speaking of which, where did I leave that cable...

Nope. At least not as of beta 3.

I hope Bitt is taking note that I'm being critical of Apple. The iPhone is going to keep smoking the competition, but there's tons of room for improvement and plenty of market for thousands of better apps.

I'm just amazed at al the clueless bloggers who think that Cut and Paste was even in the top ten of most important things the iPhone needs. Cut and Paste isn't nearly as useful when there's no document support on the platform. The iPhone's biggest missing feature is a shared document space.

The next biggest problem is that Apple's app design has focused far too heavily on an always-connected paradigm, which makes many of their applications useless or next to useless when you don't have a live internet connection. Examples: Safari, Maps, YouTube, Weather. Safari doesn't even have the ability to cache worth a damn, let alone store downloads such as PDFs. If you open another "tab" after "viewing" a large PDF, have fun while it downloads again when you switch back to it. Have I mentioned I hate mobile Safari with a passion? It's the "real" web as much as using Lynx is the real web.

Of course the omnipresent blogosphere only focuses on its lack of Flash - which is as important or useful as having a second asshole.

I couldn't care less about documents on the iPhone, yet I find situations where I neet Cut and Paste every single day.

Something as simple as pasting something into a short email, or a web form (such as posting to this BBS or a blog site).

Selecting and copying a street address from an email or a web site and pasting it into another email, or into a contact in the address book.

Those are things I want to do every day and I can't do them without cut and paste. Sure, sometimes there are "forward" features and "Add to contacts" and "email this link" but not every desired situation is covered by these features.

Tom, do you have beta 3? I think the iPhone is the greatest little device ever, but it has one MAJOR problem for me -- you can't just tap to dial a phone number from a calendar entry. Everywhere else you can tap on a phone number, but not from the calendar where you really need it. Is this fixed in OS 3? If so, I might just throw down the $99 to get it right away (I do at least 8-10 conference calls per week).

Thanks!

Jim

Data detectors appear to be on in the notes section of an appointment, and phone numbers are picked up.

However I wouldn't recommend using beta 3 in daily use on a critical device. It's still got plenty of instabilities, and many 3rd party apps have problems. Once a device is upgraded, it can't go back to 2.21 without some jailbreaking pain.