Actually, I am really excited to tell you about Stanford University's New iphone / Objective-C Class. CS193P is being recorded and made freely available on iTunes U. More information can be found at:
itunes.stanford.edu they are also exposing the class/instructors website.
CS193P
I am totally new to iphone development and objective-C. I am comfortable with OO Designs and I have varied experience with other C based languages. But if you have enough drive and the patients to explore these concepts, then you should consider following along with the class even without meeting these prerequisites.
This is class is taught by Evan Doll, he is an engineer at Apple and graduated at Stanford in 2003. The class is also taught by Alan Cannistaro, also an Apple Engineer.
I downloaded the class a couple of days ago, and the first 5 minutes of the video had bad encoding, I recently downloaded it again, and that has since been repaired. I am not sure if it was just a bad download, or if there was a server side repair made.
Evan does an excellent job explaining the underlying structures of the iphone development platforms and at the end of the lesson he gives a 6 minute demo of a simple app that demonstrate how outlets are used without the need for sub classing. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to reproduce the demo, but being the curious sort, I decided to give it a try. This was my first exposure to Xcode, so it was an excellent starting point for me. I followed along, stopping the video at each step. It is also worth taking a little time to click around the Xcode IDE, Evan adjusted the view in the Library Panel to "view icons" where as mine defaulted to "view icons and descriptions", So at first glance I didn't think I was in the right window. (At first I was watching the class on my iphone, but when it came time to copy some code. The screen was too small to read the text.) During my first attempt I made a mistake that I couldn't figure out how to repair. So I downloaded his finished code example from the class site. Being a total newbe, I tried to run Evan's downloaded code and I got an error: [There is no SDK with specified name or path 'Unknown Path']. After some blog surfing, I discovered how to fix this.: In Xcode: Click on Project > Edit Project Settings > Base SDK for All Configurations: there you can select a device or a simulator. I selected Simulator - iPhone OS 2.2.1 and everything worked fine after that. I later went back reproduced the demo without error. On to the next lesson!
