mac newbie needs a machine to develop

[Saeed Raimi]

Hi
I am a windows programmer and have been doing it for a while (20 years) mostly in c/ c# /c++ /vb..
I would like to start developing apps for iphones. For that I know i need a Mac i guess
wih spec I have no idea (Apple Mac mini 2.5GHz ????) i know i also need a development kit that i have been told it free to download .. i also was told i need to join the Developers group for iphone and that cost 99 bucks a year...

1-my question is how long do you reckon i need ,to master this and find my way around development on iphone working 2-3 hours a day.

2-most things on windows are sough by googling and checking codeguru and other sites that programmers hangout and the info they give out is free . do we have such communities for this well or has apple limited this ?


3-Appreciate your thought if you do come from where I am coming from and have been on this road in the past - cheers

[Jarin Udom]

Hi Saeed,

Ok so any recent Mac will work just fine for iPhone development, as long as it supports OS X Mavericks. You can get a Mac Mini even, although I did the same thing and ended up switching to it as my primary computer and ended up upgrading to an iMac anyway :D

You only need the $99/year iOS Developer membership once you're getting ready to deploy your app, or if you want to start developing apps with Swift (because you'll need the iOS 8 beta and the beta version of XCode).

1) When I first got started with iPhone development, I had about 3 years of dev experience. I think it took me about 3 weeks from knowing nothing to having an app ready for the App Store, although it was a fairly basic data-driven app that read from someone else's API. Depending on what you're making, you can speed things up a lot by using Parse or Firebase or another web-based data store as your backend.

2) Stack Overflow is a good resource, and there are a ton of communities and resources out there. Once you get going, you'll have a better idea of what to Google for. Apple's documentation is also excellent and has good beginner tutorials.

3) As you're a .Net developer, I recommend NOT taking the "easy" road with something like MonoTouch (aka Xamarin.iOS). It may seem like it's the path of least resistance, and it does have its fans, but I highly recommend just learning how to write native code. There are a lot more resources out there for you to use and learn from when you're writing your apps in Objective-C. In fact, even though Swift is the new hotness, I'd suggest making a simple UITableView based app with existing Objective-C based tutorials first. Then throw that all away and start learning with Swift. It will be a little rougher to find help since Swift is so new, but you'll have a better grasp on how to look up the Obj-C based solution to a problem and convert it to Swift in your head.

Good luck :)

Jarin Udom