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I have a job from a client that needs a iPhone/iPad app. I'm new to the smartphone development so where do I begin with? Do you have some nice in depth beginning tutorials of some kind? JS libraries I need to look into? Is there a startup boilerplate for iPhone/Android out there with a beneficial starting setup kit or something like that?

In general, is there something I really need to know before I start?

My coding background is:

  • HTML/CSS
  • jQuery/Javascript (rookie)
  • C#
  • AS 3.0
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closed as not a real question by gnat, Walter, Glenn Nelson, GlenH7, Frank Shearar Jan 18 at 17:44

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

4 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I have a job like that as well - an iPad app is required now with a view to expand to an Android tablet in the future.

I've decided to use Sencha Touch and PhoneGap. This offers the ability to use existing skills in web development to develop mobile applications for multiple platforms.

Regarding tutorials, Sencha Touch have a number of really great screencasts showing a number of features and explaining all of the concepts. I've found them really useful. The videos are in the API documentation.

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Very helpful. I will look into it. Thanks a lot! – Jeppe Strøm Dec 6 '11 at 23:24
PhoneGap is now an Aapche project, so fully open source. I also heard it's the basis for a future standard of some sort or other of Web API. – gbjbaanb Dec 7 '11 at 12:34
up vote 3 down vote

Have a look at jQuery Mobile, but it requires strong JavaScript and jQuery knowledge.
Also, Application Craft looks really interesting. I'm considering it myself.

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up vote 1 down vote

If you're looking at iPhone/iPad development only then I would suggest looking at Sencha Touch or JQTouch bundled into PhoneGap (PhoneGap is an application which bundles web documents such as html/javascript into a launchable application for mobile devices); however from my experience neither of them provide consistency across platforms and can perform noticebly slow on devices such as Android.

If cross platform compatibility is important to you then my suggestion would be to look at Appcelerator which is all Javascript based but compliles down to native code such as Java or Objective C depending on which device you compile it for and runs just as smooth as native apps for the most part.

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up vote 0 down vote

With what you know you could look something like Dreamweaver CS5.5

develop HTML5 applications for the two mobile operating systems supported in Dreamweaver, iOS and Android, and generate a native app for each OS

... or PhoneGap

Applications developed with HTML5 compile as native apps for different platforms, such as IOS, iPhone and iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Symbian. And access to the camera, the accelerometer, GPS, a user's contacts, and more purely using JavaScript.

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Why? Please expand your answer to tell us why & how the tools will be helpful to the OP. Don't just post a couple of links. – Yannis Rizos♦ Jan 11 '12 at 8:33
I explain a little about the two options becouse on the links are all information. For example PhoneGap allow you develop native mobile application for AppStore, Android Market, AppWorld y Nokia Store using HTML5. – user11335 Jan 11 '12 at 21:49
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Check out the how to answer guidelines, especially the "Provide context for links" section. Even if all the information is on the links, you have to provide context for them, i.e. why & how they are relevant to the question. You can even copy small quotes from each link, if you think they explain it better than you can (but don't forget to use blockquotes). Also, add everything to the question itself, not in comments - edit the question. – Yannis Rizos♦ Jan 11 '12 at 21:53
OK, I will consider it for future answers – user11335 Jan 11 '12 at 22:40
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Why only for future answers? You can edit this one as well. Editing it will bump it up naturally, and people can actually upvote it, because it's possibly a helpful answer and it's possibly only downvoted because of the no context links... – Yannis Rizos♦ Jan 11 '12 at 23:08

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