iOS What programming language is used for iTouch?

[kristenanne77]

My son is studying engineering classes and I insisted he take a computer class or two, because like it or not, they are not going away.. He says "Boring". Anyway, he is taking a "C" class (not C+,or C++, or C (something else), just C).

Being one of the largest consumers of new apple products when they come out, he said excitedly, "Hey, maybe I can make a program for the iTouch" . All of a sudden the thought of programming became less boring.

I myself had a backround in programming from the OLD days (fortran,... assembler language .. .. stuff like that) and I am familiar with the concept of object oriented programming, although I can't do it.

So some general questions would be
"What programming language is used to make iTouch applications?
Also since he is learning C , and I may be completely off-base on this, is there a compiler available to translate the C code into the specific language an iTouch understands. In the olden days we used compilers ... not sure how all this new stuff works nowadays.

And this should probably have been the first question: Do you have any recomendations on how someone would go about learning to program an iTouch application? Books, Aids etc.

Thanks
K

 

[techfreak85]

objective c i believe

 

[ritsard]

the iPhone/iPod Touch uses Objective-C which is a relative of C. Since he is learning programming, that would be a good start. He would be able to get the basic concepts of programming. However, he would need to learn object oriented programming. He can pickup a book by aaron hillegass programming in object-c which will also introduce cocoa which is the framework used on Mac os.

 

[beg_ne]

iPhone and iPod Touch programming uses Objective-C (you can also supplement the code with standard C code) and using the Cocoa Touch API.

To program for them he'll need:

1. An Intel based Mac, and Leopard
2. The iPhone SDK which has all the libraries, documentation and tools to program and build the apps. This is free to download, and he will be able to run the apps in the simulator on his Mac. He needs to sign up for a free account at http://developer.apple.com

If he wants to sell the app, or install the app on his iPod Touch he'll need to pay the $99 yearly fee for the standard user account.

The documentation and sample code provided by Apple should be more than enough to get him started.



Along with all the free tutorials online and maybe an iPhone book or two (The books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf http://www.pragprog.com are good) he shouldn't need much more.

 

[mrj412]

Standford published their iPhone programming course from last spring for free on iTunes U.

 

[saberahul]

Also check out the Dummies guide to Programming Objec -C
Now I'm not calling you a dummy, i'm only saying that their books are great and helpful. Give it a try.

 

[kristenanne77]

Thank you all, thats a great start.

K

 

[firewood]

The languages supported on the iPod Touch itself are armv6 machine code (with UIKit, some posix API, and some Objective C runtime support), plus Javascript and SQLite. You can write a web app in Javascript for your Touch, or use the Xcode SDK to compile Objective C (which is a superset of standard C), or a mix of the two (using a UIWebview for the Javascript).

Some game development kits hide support for the Lua scripting language inside, so the use of other languages is possible, as long as that's invisible to the user (and maybe to the app reviewers).

Not sure how much of a program one can write in SQLite query language.

y

 

[wonza]

You can get buy with just a small amount of Object-C and the rest can all be C