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Chapter 1: Creating Killer iPhone Applications
Originally, I thought I would simply create this application and then get on
with the rest of the book. It turned out, however, that as I showed my friends
the application, I got a lot of feedback and made some changes to it. I include
those changes as well — because they give you insight to the iPhone appli-
cation-development process. All my friends also told me that they’d love to
have the application. (Hey, they’re my friends, after all.)
To pay them back for using them as a test group, I uploaded it to the App
Store — I show you how to do the same with yours, in detail, in Chapter 12.
Although that app has been eclipsed by some of the newer features rolled out
as part of the new iPhone OS 4, it’s still a worthwhile exercise. Before, during,
or after you’ve completed it yourself, go to the App Store and download it to
your phone to see what this book is about — showing you what you need to
do to create your own apps and get them into the App Store.
After I go through developing ReturnMeTo, I take you through the design of
MobileTravel411 in Chapter 13. Then I show you how to implement a subset
of this application, iPhoneTravel411, which shows you how to use much of
the technology that implements the functionality of the MobileTravel411
application. You find out how to use table views (like the ones you see in the
Contacts, iPod, Mail, and Settings applications that come with the iPhone),
access data on the Web, go out to and return from Web sites while staying in
your application, store data in files, include data with your application, allow
users to set preferences, and even how to resume your application where the
user last left off. I even talk about localization and self-configuring controllers
and models. (Don’t worry; by the time you get there, you’ll know exactly what
they mean.)
Because mapping and working with the user’s location is such a big part of
mobile applications, I show you how easy it is to create custom maps that are
tailored to the needs of the user based on what she’s doing and where she
is. These maps will have annotations (those pins you see in the Maps appli-
cation that give you information about that location when you tap them),
and the annotations will be draggable so the user can change their location
and what it says when they are tapped, Finally I show you how to monitor a
user’s location in the background and notify him or her when they need to
know something — even when your app isn’t running!
I use real-world applications to show the concepts and give you the back-
ground on how things really work on the iPhone — the in-depth knowledge
you really need to go beyond the simple “Hello World” apps and create those
killer iPhone applications. So be prepared! There may be some places where
you might want to say, “Get on with it,” but — based on my experience — I’m
giving you what you’ll need to move from following recipes in a cookbook by
rote to modifying and even creating your own recipes.
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