iOS Hobbyist Programmer

[Imperatore]

Edit: Just read FAQ which answered question about emulator. More concern about damaging device.

Good afternoon,

I used to dabble in C++/DirectX API purely as a hobby, my profession is not in IT. Anyway, I'll be getting a MBP when the new line release and I had a question about the SDK.

I have an iPhone that I use daily and obviously would be testing as I'm learning on it. Is there any chance I could actually break my device or is there some sort of rollback function incase my code crashes my phone?

Or does the SDK enable you to run the app within the MAC OS without obvious touch screen funtionality?

Many thanks

 

[chipandtoast]

They have an iPhone simulator that you can run on but it doesn't include a couple things like multi touch, it also is faster than the iPhone. So even if it runs fine on the simulator it might not run on an iPhone properly. I haven't heard of anyone breaking their iPhones through programming.

 

[Imperatore]

Ok that's interesting to know, many thanks.

 

[ranguvar]

No, you'll not break anything that's impossible to fix with a restore unless you try very hard.

 

[HarryWorksInc]

Bottom line is the application may crash and not work so you can re-instal but an application will never crash your iphone because the applications are just an extension of the spring board and us developers cannot access the spring board which is the base of the device. So when an application crashes it will automatically receive a kill command from the iphone and quit the application to the spring board and cannot effect the device.

Now none of this is true if your thinking of hacking and i'll tell you now. Don't.

 

[Imperatore]

I have neither the desire or the ability to hack! It really is just for a bit of fun and I'll get a few months reading done because I won't have my MBP until they release the new line.

I'm going to buy:

 

[DaveP]

Agreed that I thinks it's impossible to brick you device. However, you can screw it up such that you need to do a factory restore (at least I have a couple times on my touch). So make sure you have any important data backed up.

I can't speak for the first book, but the second one is excellent.

 

[detz]

I'm pretty sure you can't even do anything that would make a restore necessary. When your app is run you're chroot jailed so you can't access stuff outside your apps directory and all memory allocation is done in such as way that you can't read or write outside your apps scope.

 

[DaveP]

I'm pretty sure you can't even do anything that would make a restore necessary. When your app is run you're chroot jailed so you can't access stuff outside your apps directory and all memory allocation is done in such as way that you can't read or write outside your apps scope.

Correct, I didn't screw things up while running an application, but rather if I recall correctly it was once while loading provisioning profiles stuff and the other was launching the debugger for the device, Xcode froze and the device would no longer boot.

 

[Hawkeye75]

I have neither the desire or the ability to hack! It really is just for a bit of fun and I'll get a few months reading done because I won't have my MBP until they release the new line.

I'm going to buy:

Those are the exact two books that I bought. I found programming in objective-c a good baseline for getting familiar with the language. While Beginning iPhone 3 Development was just right for teaching you Xcode and the nuances of writing an iPhone application. Once you get through the latter you will have most the tools you will need to write your own app. I have since bought the follow up book to that one from the same authors.

Enjoy!