Rants About Software

My first iPhone App, Petter, is available in the App Store!

It took a bit longer to get out there than I had anticipated (about 2 months longer), but it's finally out and it's been quite a learning experience.

Developing Petter

I built Petter for the learning experience more than anything. I currently have more exciting apps in the works (and even more exciting ones in my brain). But I wanted to really nail down the basics of iPhone development before getting into the bigger projects. So I picked up a copy of Beginning iPhone Development and got to work!

Although Petter is a fairly simple app, there are actually a lot of different aspects of iPhone development that went into it. To build Petter I had to learn/employ...

• Objective-C and the Xcode Environment - Before starting iPhone development, I had never coded in Objective-C, nor had I ever used Xcode. Although Xcode was fairly intuitive, there were some aspects of Objective-C that just work differently from the other languages that I'm used to. (Tying my code in with the Interface Builder was particularly awkward.)


• SQLite - Petter uses SQLite to store your pet's information. Although I was already familiar with SQL syntax, I had never previously used SQLite and I certainly didn't know how to integrate it into my app.


• File System - Petter uses the file system to store your pet's images. This means that you can delete your pet's image from your photo library, and the image in Petter will be unaffected. Not being able to browse the iPhone's file system made this somewhat difficult to debug.


• GUI - Petter uses a combination of a TableView and multiple UIViews. The TableView also has custom designed cells. To pull this off, I had to design screens in the Interface Builder, tie the GUI controls in with my code, allow the screens to be able to pass data to each other, and override default functionality of the provided controls. Yeah, it was a lot more work than you would think.


• Accelerometer and Touch Screen -Although not used extensively, I had to learn how to capture touch events as well as retrieve accelerometer data in order to trigger the sound effects.

Future Apps

I realize Petter isn't the most exciting thing in the App Store, but like I said, I did it mainly for the learning experience. Now that I have a much better understanding of iPhone development, I'll hopefully be able to produce some much more exciting apps in the near future, so be sure to check back for that!

Check out Petter in iTunes!