Cocoaphony

Summary: Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK does not provide the student a strong foundation in Cocoa, but does teach key iPhone-UI topics well. For readers with a prior background in Cocoa, it is likely a good book for transitioning to iPhone, particularly iPhone UI.

Beginning iPhone Development is a pretty good book. It assumes you already have some background in ObjC, which makes it harder for people without any Cocoa experience (the most common place to get ObjC experience). A short ObjC intro would have been useful. Like other books in this space, it doesn’t provide much background in basic Foundation features like Collections and Notifications, nor key patterns like delegation, memory management and naming. As students move beyond trivial projects, they will likely start to have trouble unless they shore up these skills elsewhere. Read more…

Summary: If you want a real understanding of Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, this book is too recipe-based to give you that. If you really want recipes, consider Apple’s Sample Code.

I haven’t been thrilled with the first crop of iPhone development books that hit the market. This shouldn’t be surprising. It’s a new platform and, as with the first AppStore apps, the pressure to be first to market fights the authors’ desire to provide the best possible product.

I was specifically asked about iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK by Erica Sadun. My biggest concern is that it’s a cookbook based on “recipes” to do this or that. This is often exactly the problem with how people learn Mac and iPhone development. They think that it’s just Java or C++ with a different syntax and if they learn where the brackets go, then they’ll be a Cocoa developer. Read more…

I’ll talk more about it later, but the absolute best way to learn iPhone is to learn Mac first. That’s how I teach my classes. The available Mac educational resources are just much better, at least today.

The absolute gold standard for learning Cocoa on Mac is Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass. It is the book. I have a syllabus based on it that’s stripped down to the chapters that are useful for iPhone programmers. I’ll get that into a blog post.

When I teach this, it runs between 5 and 10 full days depending on how in-depth I cover the Mac side. Read more…

• There is only one keychain, and it belongs to the OS.
  • It is backed-up, but it’s encrypted w/ a key that is not backed-up.
• You can only read your own keychain entries, so you can’t share data this way
• “Your own” is defined by your application name (not identifier)
  • If you change your application name to match some other application, you can read it’s keychain
  • You will of course overwrite that application in the process
  • This fact does not appear to be documented, so it might change
• Because the keychain belongs to the OS, it outlives your app.
  • Even if your app is deleted from the phone
  • And reinstalled… your old keychain data is still there.
  • Beware if you change your keychain format
  • I know of no way to clear out the old data except to walk through and delete them all inside your app