Recap of day one

Since I want to take my iPhone game development work as seriously as possible, I've decided I'm going to implement some checks and balances for myself, and part of this keeping track of the things I do each day. Even though this is day two of development, I didn't do this last night so I need to document what I did yesterday. Xcode 3.2.3 and the SDK 4 are downloading right now anyway, so I've got a moment.

I had previously setup Xcode and an older version of the SDK, so I had the ability to mess around with some code and all that before I started yesterday morning. The first thing I needed to do then was get my iPhone Developer's License which gets me into the Apple Dev Program. It's $99/year and gives me access to a boatload of Apple documentation, development conference lectures and labs, sample code, etc. It also is a requirement for getting the proper certificates to sign compiled code to execute on the iPhone. I don't really agree with having to pay to run code on a device, but that's the deal. Also, it allows me to upload final versions of apps to the App Store approval process where my work will be scrutinized, checked for bugs, and hopefully be put onto the App Store when all is said and done.

Once I had these resources, I dove in. I watched about two hours of conference lectures, 'Introduction to Mac and iPhone Development' and 'Introduction to Game Development for iPhone'. A lot of it was information available in the resource docs, but I tend to pick things up easier when they are spoken to me rather than reading it myself.

I also ordered two books, The iPhone Developer's Cookbook and iPhone Game Development, the first of which is praised as required reference for any iPhone developer, app or game, and the second one that seemed to have a good step by step flow for introducing me to a lot of the iPhone specific concepts used in game development.

Lastly, towards the end of the day I got all the certificates necessary setup for building the code for the device and had a colorful spinning cube displayed on my iPhone. All in all it was an extremely successful day and I'm looking forward to writing today's entry later this afternoon.