IPhone application development challenges and solutions

Includes bibliographical references (page 44)The iPhone is one of the great stories in computing history. At the time of this writing over 500,000 iPhone apps have been developed since its launch. This is undoubtedly a staggering figure. Although an interesting platform both for the societal and cultural implications this project focused on the technological challenges of iPhone development through the eyes of a living breathing iPhone application. The application developed is called Creative Spin which aimed to capture the spirit of the listening experience set forth by radio stations. \ud The model used to develop the application was Agile by nature, using short life cycles which aimed to add on functionality through each iteration of development. Each development cycle included the traditional phases of software development: requirements analysis, design, implement, test, and repeat. The life cycles for development were: build out the framework for the UI, prototype the core feature, verify the prototype, design the core feature using object oriented design principles and patterns, implement the core feature, verify the core feature, conceive of new features to add to the application, integrate new feature into application, perform integration and unit testing on new feature, \ud and finally perform UAT (User Acceptance Testing).\ud The key technologies used to develop the application are Xcode, Interface Builder, Objective C, and the Cocoa framework. Xcode is Apple's IDE for iPhone application development. Interface Builder is an application that allows you to create the UI for an iPhone application and ???wire??? it into the program. Although Interface Builder is a powerful tool that undoubtedly aids in the development of iPhone applications, the UI for Creative Spin was built programmatically whenever possible to gain a better understanding of the UI frameworks provided by Apple. Objective C is an object oriented programming language that is a super set of C. Apple has referred to Objective C as its secret weapon [6]. Although the project does not aim to describe all of the unique and powerful aspects of the language and the Cocoa framework, some important points will be articulated where appropriate