iOS How Can I Develop My Own Apps To Sell?

[HappyDude20]

I've been an avid Mac user for years now and an iPhone/iPod Touch user for a year.

2 things:

I'd love to create my own apps, catered from my interests, in hopes others would enjoy them but mainly for personal use. And secondly would love to sell apps within the App Store.

What do I need to do to be able to create my own apps to sell and how to create them?

Is it easy? A lot of work and/or knowledge required? Along what lines?

 

[synth3tik]

Sitting down with a nice "Programing in C" would be the fullest way.

Or sit down with a book on Xcode.

Either way you will not have anything written next week. You'll have to learn some programing.

 

[speedracer3000]

you will need to apply, be accepted by apple, and pay an annual fee to be a registered iphone developer in order to put your app in the app store. that's the easy part .
the hard part is that with the iphone app market being significantly more competitive than the days when the app store first opened, you will really need to come up with something great and continue to support it with updates to win over the competition. If you have little or no programming experience, it will definitely take quite a bit of effort and comittment to get to the point of selling a profitable app. Of course if you just want to create something for personal enjoyment and don't really care if it sells or not, you are certainly welcome to pursue it as well. good luck

 

[kameko]

is this a joke? can you even program?

 

[fenrus110]

1. code
2. ?
3. profit

 

[spinyanteater]

First, take no notice of any sniping on this forum. Of course you can start without any programming background - it's just a lot harder! But it's still fun . Have a look at some of the resources below and see if it's for you.

You need to download the iPhone SDK, then for programming basics take a look at 'Become an X-coder', free from CocoaLab
http://www.cocoalab.com/?q=becomeanxcoder

After that, the usual recommendations are Kochan "Programming in Objective-C" and the key text "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Hillegass. Hillegass doesn't include anything on the iPhone unfortunately though. I've just bought "Beginning iPhone Development" by Steve Mark and Jefff LaMarche which looks very promising but I haven't had time to do much with it yet. Chapter 3 is available as a free download here:
http://apress.com/book/downloadfile/4160

And if you want to play with the SDK straight away, take a look at the tutorials here:
http://www.iphonedevcentral.org/viewtutorials.php?page=Tutorials&cmd=ViewAll&number=1

 

[JonnyThunder]

I started in August sometime, with no knowledge of C, Obj-C or Cocoa. I learned through a very basic C book for structure, followed by the Apple Objective-c documentation, then Stephen Kochans book - and finally Aaron Hillegass book. I've also got Core Animation by Bill Dudney and XCode 3 unleashed by Fritz Anderson.

You can be up and running with simple Cocoa projects in not too much time, but it's taken me 3 months to get to having my first iPhone app actually ON the phone. I still feel like Ive a long way to go, but believe it will be worthwhile studying. Oh, also remember to sign up for developer account with Apple if you're serious. For my Ltd company, it took a while.

Oh - also beware of programming snobs on the forums, who think that if they find it easy - you should also find it easy. As Aaron Hillegass says in his book "You're not stupid - this IS hard".

 

[firewood]

also beware of programming snobs on the forums, who think that if they find it easy...

The programming snobs know it's not easy. They've seen too many people fail after months of trying. (Or years. I've met an embarrassingly non-zero number of "professional" programmers with CS degrees who can barely code their way out of a paper bag.)

What the snobs don't like is the newbies who copy the numbers "1" and "2", and then come here asking someone else to write the code to add them, because they're too lazy to keep hitting the textbooks until they can figure out how to do addition in the proper software paradigm themselves.

 

[JonnyThunder]

The programming snobs know it's not easy. They've seen too many people fail after months of trying. (Or years. I've met an embarrassingly non-zero number of "professional" programmers with CS degrees who can barely code their way out of a paper bag.)

What the snobs don't like is the newbies who copy the numbers "1" and "2", and then come here asking someone else to write the code to add them, because they're too lazy to keep hitting the textbooks until they can figure out how to do addition in the proper software paradigm themselves.

I can understand that there are some people who just want others to do their work for them. But in my case, while my learning was still in it's infancy, it would have been handy to have people answer the questions that I had. Understand that when some people are asking for help, it's because they don't understand the text they have read and need clarification.

In the last 10 years of internet use (for programming help) - the Mac / iPhone community is the ONLY community where I've consistently encountered issues with responses, because people assume I haven't read something correctly.

Since then, I've limited my requests to a minimum on here - favoring moving in different circles to get my answers. I think THAT is a real shame, and not at all how someone should feel about approaching a 'discussion' forum for help.