In this clear and concise book, Jonathan Zdziarski -- one of the original hackers of the iPhone -- explains how developers can design third-party software that will run on this device. You'll learn about iPhone's proprietary development environment, the Objective-C language it uses, and background on the operating system. You also get detailed recipes and working examples for several iPhone features.

Certain technologies bring out everyone's hidden geek, and iPhone did the moment it was released. Even though Apple created iPhone as a closed device, tens of thousands of developers bought them with the expressed purpose of designing and running third-party software.

In this clear and concise book, veteran hacker Jonathan Zdziarski -- one of the original hackers of the iPhone -- explains the iPhone's native environment and how you can build software for this device using its Objective-C, C, and C++ development frameworks.

iPhone Open Application Development walks you through the iPhone's proprietary development environment, offers an overview of the Objective-C language you'll use with it, and supplies background for the iPhone operating system. You also get detailed recipes and working examples for everyone's favorite iPhone features -- graphics and audio programming, interfaces for adding multitouch functionality to games, the use of hardware sensors, and the device's vast user interface kit.

This book explains:

How to access the iPhone's underlying operating system

The makeup of an iPhone application

How to get the open source tool chain running on your desktop

The iPhone's core user interface framework, which is heavily tied to major application-level functions

Using the many touted iPhone features such as multitouch, hardware sensors, and gestures

Intercepting and handling event notifications for many iPhone-related events

Raw video surfaces and 3D transformations that take you deeper into advanced graphics on the iPhone

How to record and play simple sounds and intercept sound events

Advanced digital audio output using Apple's new Audio Toolbox framework

Advanced user interface components such as section lists, keyboards, and image manipulation

The Appendix includes a compendium of miscellaneous code examples for cool application features, such as using the camera and creating a CoverFlow®-like album browser.

This book is a true hacker's book, designed for the millions of users who have run third party applications on their iPhone, but its concepts and code examples have shown to be remarkably similar to Apple's official SDK, making this book a valuable resource for both camps. Any programmer can use this book to write applications with the same spectacular effects that made the device an immediate hit, and impress users just as much as the official iPhone software does. That programmer can easily be you.

Jonathan Zdziarski is better known as the hacker "NerveGas" in the iPhone development community. He is well known for his work in cracking the iPhone and lead the effort to port the first open source applications. Hailed on many geek news sites for his accomplishments, Jonathan is best known for the first application to illustrate and take full advantage of the major iPhone APIs: NES.app, a portable Nintendo Entertainment System emulator.

Jonathan is also a full-time research scientist and longtime spam-fighter. He is founder of the DSPAM project, a high profile, next-generation spam filter that was acquired in 2006 by a company designing software accelerators. He lectures widely on the topic of spam and is a foremost researcher in the fields of machine-learning and algorithmic theory.

Jonathan's website is zdziarski.com.