Post: A guide to Objective-C
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01-10-2010, 10:50 AM
#1
^5
1337 hackor 
Sections
1. Background
2. Requirements
3. Where to begin
4. Links
5. Tutorials [Coming soon]
1. Background.
Originally posted by another user
Objective-C was created primarily by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s at their company Stepstone. Both had been introduced to Smalltalk while at ITT Corporation’s Programming Technology Center in 1981. Cox had become interested in the problems of true reusability in software design and programming. He realized that a language like Smalltalk would be invaluable in building development environments for system developers at ITT. Cox began by modifying the C compiler to add some of the capabilities of Smalltalk. He soon had a working implementation of an object-oriented extension to the C language, which he called "OOPC" for Object-Oriented Programming in C. Meanwhile, Love was hired by Schlumberger Research in 1982 and had the opportunity to acquire the first commercial copy of Smalltalk-80, which further influenced development of their brainchild.
In order to demonstrate that real progress could be made, Cox showed that making interchangeable software components really needed only a few practical changes to existing tools. Specifically, they needed to support objects in a flexible manner, come supplied with a usable set of libraries, and allow for the code (and any resources needed by the code) to be bundled into a single cross-platform format.
Love and Cox eventually formed a new venture, Productivity Products International (PPI), to commercialize their product, which coupled an Objective-C compiler with class libraries. In 1986, Cox published the main description of Objective-C in its original form in the book Object-Oriented Programming, An Evolutionary Approach. Although he was careful to point out that there is more to the problem of reusability than just the language, Objective-C often found itself compared feature for feature with other languages.
[edit]
In order to demonstrate that real progress could be made, Cox showed that making interchangeable software components really needed only a few practical changes to existing tools. Specifically, they needed to support objects in a flexible manner, come supplied with a usable set of libraries, and allow for the code (and any resources needed by the code) to be bundled into a single cross-platform format.
Love and Cox eventually formed a new venture, Productivity Products International (PPI), to commercialize their product, which coupled an Objective-C compiler with class libraries. In 1986, Cox published the main description of Objective-C in its original form in the book Object-Oriented Programming, An Evolutionary Approach. Although he was careful to point out that there is more to the problem of reusability than just the language, Objective-C often found itself compared feature for feature with other languages.
[edit]
2. Requirements.
You need a few things,
• A Mac is strongly recommended as you will fine nearly no support otherwise.
• An iPhone or iPod touch if you're developing for iPhone, however if you don't buy a license, then you won't be able to use it.
• A license. To get a license go to You must login or register to view this content. and click enrol, it'll cost $99 for the standard program so you might want to try before you buy.
•Xcode. Xcode is the program used to code and compile, you can download it for free from You must login or register to view this content.
Thats it (I think) so lets get started.
3. Where to begin.
Well after downloading all the stuff, setup and install xcode. You might want to go to the iPhone Dev Center and download some example codes, as well as check out some of the tutorials there. You should always begin by reading the code, understanding how it works, then try and build it yourself. This is what I use, and it works for me. Now, let me guess, you want to make a game? If so then you should probably check out Cocos2d You must login or register to view this content. its one of the best free game engines out there, and is very basic to set up. Don't like 2d? Then maybe you might like Unity3D You must login or register to view this content. However this costs $399, so you might want to find the trial version *wink wink*
4. Links
These are some sites that I think might help you
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I'll be posting some more links soon, as well as a tutorial section. So good luck, get coding
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