December 2011
Beginner
544 pages
14h 32m
English
Content preview from iPhone: The Missing Manual, 5th EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 8. All About Apps
When you get right down to it, the iPhone is a computer. It’s got memory, a screen, a processor, WiFi; It runs a variant of Mac OS X. But during the first year of its existence, people couldn’t write new programs (apps) for it. Apple didn’t allow it.
Apple said it was only trying to preserve the stability of the phone and of the AT&T network. It needed time to redesign the iPhone operating system, to create a digital sandbox where all those loose-cannon non-Apple programs could run without interfering with the iPhone’s “real” functions.
During that year of preparation, new programs appeared on the iPhone, all right—but in forms that most ordinary iPhone fans didn’t bother with. There were the semi-lame “Web apps,” which were little more than iPhone-shaped Web pages, and there were hacks.
That’s right, hacks. The hacking community learned to “jailbreak” the iPhone, using special software tools to open it up (metaphorically speaking) and shoehorn their own programs onto it, violating their warranties in the process.
Finally, though, Apple threw open its doors to independent programmers by the tens of thousands, and in July 2008, it offered a simple way for you to get the new iPhone programs they wrote: the iPhone App Store.
Welcome to App Heaven
“App” is short for application, meaning software program, and the App Store is a single, centralized catalog of every authorized iPhone add-on program in the world.
Nothing like the App Store had ever been attempted before. ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.