Cocoa Touch™ for iPhone® OS 3

Chapter 1. Getting to Know Your Tools

In This Chapter

Becoming familiar with Xcode and Interface Builder

They say that when a craftsman finds a tool that he loves, over time it becomes an extension of him. He learns its idiosyncrasies inside and out, backwards and forwards, and this leads to a relationship that transcends simple use of the tool and instead becomes more involved. The tool becomes an extension of his hand, an extension that he can guide with an almost extrasensory vision.

You are fortunate then, that Apple provides you with an excellent set of free tools for developing software for the iPhone. They are tools that have evolved over the last 15 years of Objective-C development, first on NeXT computers, then on Mac OS X, and now for iPhone.

In this chapter, you will take a brief look at these tools and learn where you can find more information about them. They are incredibly powerful tools that seem to be unique in software development, both for their ability to provide enough power to enable incredibly complex software systems to be developed, and also because they seem to know just when to stay out of your way and simply provide a great text-editing environment for you to write code in.

Unfortunately, a comprehensive description of every last feature of these applications is beyond the scope of this book, and so I won't be delving into them in great detail. My main goal here is simply to introduce you to the tools so that you're familiar with them.

Introducing Xcode

The cornerstone ...