Our foray into App development for Apple iPhone's started on 4th August 2011, the day our developer account was approved!

With no previous iPhone specific programming knowledge, I started a fast-track 'learning while producing' approach to pick up the various different technologies to use:

• XCode 4 - This is the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) you use to write your code and design your user interfaces.
• Objective C - This is the primary coding language used by iOS devices. You also use some C functions as well, but primarily for creation of classes, objects and sending messages (using methods) it is Objective C.
• Various hoops and hurdles within the developer portal where you create profiles/certificates to enable you to install your applications to your testing devices and create your App Store page information and photos.

We needed an iPhone version of our popular UK Tax Calculators website. Rather than charge for this, we decided upon an advertisement supported free version - click here to see the final product!

It was possible to create an app in a relatively short time with no prior experience. For me (About 4-5 hours a day) :

4 Aug - Started Development

5 days of working through tutorials, Lynda iPhone Essentials Video, Watching Apple's developer conference tutorial sessions.

10 Aug - Started creating the user interface graphical assets.

14 Aug - Created custom classes for my own toggle buttons, scrolling (Vertical/Horizontal).

16 Aug - Learning core-data and creating a singleton class to handle saving/reading data from entity table.

19 Aug - Getting my head around iAds!

22 Aug - Putting all the code together and tweaking my PHP Tax Calculator API a little.

25 Aug - Testing.

28 Aug - Figuring out how to submit an iPhone App to the App Store.

29 Aug - Submitted the App!

I'm not going to detail the development process/create a tutorial here just yet... still working hard on the next app, but will return here at some point to create a quick fire tutorial for the entire process used to get our 'UK Tax Calculators Mobile' App created.

In the meantime, I'll be getting my head stuck into the Cocos3D Framework for iOS. This can be used to create great 3D games!