iPhone Open Application Development: Write Native Applications Using the Open Source Tool Chain

by Jonathan Zdziarski

Overview

"Great for beginners -- even if you don't know object-oriented programming, you can learn from examples on the 'Net and be on your way very soon. You will be able to confidently build apps that rival the ones included by Apple itself."-- Josh Content, iPhone Developer

Developers everywhere are eager to create applications for the iPhone, and many of them prefer the open source, community-developed tool chain to Apple's own toolkit. In this new edition of iPhone Open Application Development, author Jonathan Zdziarski covers the latest version of the open toolkit -- now updated for Apple's iPhone 2.x software and iPhone 3G -- and explains in clear language how to create applications using Objective-C and the iPhone API.

Zdziarski, who cracked the iPhone code and built the first fully-functional application with the open toolkit, includes detailed recipes and complete examples for graphics and audio programming, games programming with the CoreSurfaces and CoreImage interfaces, working with iTunes, and using sensors. With the open toolkit and this book, you can build iPhone applications that:

• Display status bars, preference tables, and other standard elements of the iPhone user interface
• Play pre-recorded files or program-generated sounds
• Read and write plain text files and HTML files, including pages from the Web, and control display elements, such as scrollbars
• Read and respond to changes in orientation when the user turns the phone around

And more. The first edition of this book developed an instant following and became the center of a movement. The second edition of iPhone Open Application Development will make this open source toolkit an indispensable part of iPhone application development.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596554187
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/14/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jonathan Zdziarski is better known as the hacker "NerveGas" in the iPhone development community. His work in cracking the iPhone helped lead the effort to port the first open source applications, and his book, iPhone Open Application Development, taught developers how to write applications for the popular device long before Apple introduced its own SDK. Prior to the release of iPhone Forensics, Jonathan wrote and supported an iPhone forensics manual distributed exclusively to law enforcement. Jonathan frequently consults law enforcement agencies and assists forensic examiners in their investigations. He teaches an iPhone forensics workshop in his spare time to train forensic examiners and corporate security personnel.

Jonathan is also a full-time research scientist specializing in machine learning technology to combat online fraud and spam, an effort that led him to develop networking products capable of learning how to protect customers. He is founder of the DSPAM project, a high-profile, next-generation spam filter that was acquired in 2006 by Sensory Networks, Inc. He lectures widely on the topic of spam and is a foremost researcher in the fields of machine-learning and algorithmic theory.

Jonathan's website is http://zdziarski.com.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

1 Breaking Into and Setting Up the iPhone 1

Jailbreak Procedures 1

Installing Additional Unix Components 4

Additional Resources 4

2 Getting Started with Applications 5

Anatomy of an Application 5

Building the Free Tool Chain 8

Building and Installing Applications 13

Transitioning to Objective-C 15

3 Introduction to UIKit 23

Basic User Interface Elements 24

Windows and Views 25

The Most Useless Application Ever 26

Deriving from UIView 28

The Second Most Useless Application Ever 29

Text Views 32

Navigation Bars 36

Transition Views 36

Action Sheets 50

Tables 56

Status Bar Manipulation 69

Application Badges 72

Application Services 73

4 Event Handling and Graphics Services 77

Introduction to Geometric Structures 77

Introduction to GSEvent 80

Example: The Icon Shuffle 85

5 Advanced Graphics Programming with Core Surface and Quartz Core 93

Understanding Layers 93

Screen Surfaces 94

Layer Animation 100

Layer Transformations 107

6 Making Some Noise 113

Core Audio: It's Great, but You Can't Use It 113

Celestial 114

Audio Toolbox 122

7 Advanced UIKit Design 149

Controls 151

Preferences Tables 157

Progress Indicators 169

UIProgressBar: When Spinny Things Are Tacky 172

Progress HUDs: When It's Important Enough to Block Stuff 175

Image Handling 178

Section Lists 189

Pickers 198

Date/Time Pickers 203

Toolbars 208

Creating a Toolbar 208

Orientation Changes 216

Web Document Views and Scrollers 220

Appendix Miscellaneous Hacks and Recipes 233

Index 245