Essential iPhone Development tasks

To develop iPhone applications, you use Xcode, Apple’s first-class integrated development environment

(IDE). Xcode provides all the tools you need to design your application’s user interface and write the code

that brings it to life. As you develop your application, you run it on your computer, an iPhone, or an iPod

touch.

After you finish developing your iPhone application, you submit it to the App Store, the secure marketplace where iPhone OS users obtain their applications. However, you should test your application on a small set of users before publishing it to cover a wide variety of usage patterns and get feedback about your product.

Essential Development Tasks

The iPhone-application development process is divided into these major steps:

1. Create your project. Xcode provides several project templates that get you started. You choose the template that implements the type of application you want to develop. 

2. Design the user interface.

The Interface Builder application lets you design your application’s user interface graphically and save those designs as resource files that you load into your application at runtime. If you do not want to use

Interface Builder, you can layout your user interface programmatically.

3. Write code.

Xcode provides several features that help you write code fast, including class and data modeling, code completion, direct access to documentation, and refactoring. 

4. Build and run your application.

You build your application on your computer and run it in the iPhone Simulator application or on your device.

5. Measure and tune application performance.

After you have a running application, you should measure its performance to ensure that it uses a device’s resources as efficiently as possible and that it provides adequate responses to the user’s gestures.