Cocoa Touch™ for iPhone® OS 3

Chapter 3. Exploring the Simulator in Depth

In This Chapter

Working with the simulator UI

Rotating and manipulating the simulator

Exploring the simulator filesystem

Learning what works on the actual hardware, and what doesn't

You're going to take a little side trip here to explore in detail the inner workings of the iPhone simulator and how you can interact with it in your development.

The simulator is an incredibly powerful development asset because it enables you to do very rapid compile/test cycles. It's much faster and easier to run your build and then fire it up on the simulator than it is to wait for it to download onto an iPhone.

It's important to note, however, that the simulator is just that, a simulator, and not an emulator. The distinction is that it does not actually emulate the iPhone or iPod Touch hardware. It is simply simulating the iPhone user interface (UI) over the top of an iPhone application, which is actually being compiled for the processor of your computer. The end result of this is that the libraries that an application running inside the simulator links with are, in fact, the same libraries that are used for your desktop applications. This can lead to some interesting inconsistencies where certain functions are available in the simulator but not on the actual iPhone hardware. You will take a look at how to avoid problems with this, as well as numerous other differences between the simulator and the iPhone hardware in this chapter.

First, let's begin by looking ...