What are iPhone Development options? Games OR Commercial Applications?

Hi,

In this post, I am going to write about development options in the iphone platform, which are broadly categorized into two heads, Games or Commercial Applications.

iPhone is an most powerful devices in the world of mobile platform with higher processing capability, smooth touch interface and long term durability. So,  it has more options from developers point of view. As a matter of fact, initially iPhone was never especially designed as a gaming device. It was rather designed for social networking, internet browsing and checking mails as most mobile manufacturers targets.

But today there are big number of games in the appstore over commercial applications. Games are the clear winner in the appstore market now. The applications (app) in appstore are generally the iphone version of the websites such as facebook app for iphone, twitter app for iphone etc.

So, while developing for iphone you have two options to go on. You can develop commercial apps or make your careers on game developing for iphones and both also :) .

• Commercial App Development

For developing commercial applications, you need to have knowledge of the iphone SDK elements. You will be exploring the iPhone SDK which is provided by Apple to you. There are different E-Books found for getting started with the iPhone SDK. While going through these books, you will find how to use the controllers and views that are used while creating application for iPhone. You will have to go through following elements to become a successful iphone app developer.

1. Views
2. TableViews
3. Navigation Controllers
4. TabBars and Pickers
5. Touch Interactions

If you are interested to learn using video tutorials, you can visit to Stanford University Site. This university provides iPhone Development course based on curriculum designed by the University. You can also download and watch the Lecture Videos of the class that are taken by Stanford Professors and former Apple employees. 

I also learned from the above lecture videos, its really awesome and feels like you are in the class. These are very helpful for learning iPhone development. There are loads of stuffs such as assignments, exam etc. which you can see after you visit above link.

If you go through above lecture, you will see that you are only taught to make iPhone apps but not Games. There are some libraries such as CoreAnimation, which can be used for creating the animations but these are really difficult for a beginners for getting started with the Game Development and create your own Game Engine. So, other options raised with the rise in popularity of iPhone and iPhone games.

• Game Development

Games has always been the most interested and market taking software of all time. While playing games, we rather enjoy playing it than think of creating it. Creating a game is not as simple as it might seems. If you want to create a game, first you need to have better knowledge of game elements. Game is a complete system of visual graphics, audios, animations and events. 

If you want to create you game from scratch, you need to create a Game Engine which would keep track of game variables, game states that occur in your game, so that you can control your game. And to create a game engine is not an easy especially when you are a Beginner Game Developer.

So, there are couple of Game Engines created by third party, which will help you to create a game within less time span. These game engines keeps track of all the low level gaming options, variables, states so that you can work and create new games on top of these engines.

Some of The Game Engines List are:

1.Torque
2.Unity 
3.SIO2 interactive
4.Oolong engine
5.Chipmonk
6.Cocos2d
7.Irrlicht

Edit: If you want to learn more about cocos2d by me, Click here.

For more information of each game engine, click on the above links. Among all the other I prefer Cocos2d. It is because:

1. It is Open Source.
2. It has got a loads of community support.
3. It has online as well as offline documentation.
4. By now it has also got a lot of tutorials in the internet. (At my learning time, there used to be very few tutorials). The blog of Ray Wenderlich is the great source of help for getting started with cocos2d.
5. There are two published books so far on getting started with cocos2d. 

Beside cocos2d, other game engines can also be bought or tested for your company. The Chipmonk is a Physics Engine which is also an Open Source and can be easily integrated with Cocos2d.

Hope these information will help you a little for getting started in iPhone development. Don't forget to leave the comments below if you have any thoughts. Thanks for reading.

Happy Sharing and Programming.