Kengineering

When we upgraded from our 1GHz Titanium PowerBook to a MacBook Pro, I was finally able to dive into iOS App development. After a couple weeks of playing around, I’ve managed to piece together 3 Down News, and got it submitted to Apple for approval last night.

Along the way I’ve come across a bunch of tools that have been a great help, here’s the list:

• TapLynx: This is where it all started. TapLynx is a framework you can base your program on to get your own app into the App Store without writing one line of code – although you can if you want to (I did!). There are a bunch of very helpful posts and nice people in the TapLynx Google Group.
• Dropbox: Back it up!!!
• Cocoa with Love: Matt Gallagher’s blog has a nice example of how to get streaming audio working in an App.
• Inkscape: Created the 3 Down Logo with this great open source program
• Gimp: Images, screenshots, logos, artwork, all made pixel perfect with The Gimp
• Glyphish: Joseph Wain has created some free icons you too can use in your iOS App.
• iPhone-Simulator Cropper: Create screenshots of your App, in the format needed for submission to Apple, from iPhone Simulator.
• SimFinger: A great Mac OS X program that will help you create an environment to record a great demo video.
• Jing: I used Jing to record some demo videos to send around to friends
• Apple’s Dev Site: This is obvious, but I think it’s important to say. There are a couple reasons the App Store is huge – of course amazing hardware is one, but the development environment, tools, APIs, and documentation that Apple has put together is simply amazing.

I hope this will not be my last post regarding my iOS adventures!