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Comment by sidwyn | Hacker News Reader

Hi guys, launched a service to kickstart iOS development and beat the learning curve. We provide short and succinct tutorials to get you started. Would love to hear your feedback/comments. Thanks!

P.S. Use 'hackernews' upon checkout for a 10% discount :)

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(Posting a separate comment because the other thread is taking too long to get reply links)

I'm guessing I need to buy the full package ($150) to learn about camera stuff for my photo sharing app. Or can I learn it with the cheaper options too?

The camera stuff is only available in the Complete Package for now. Hope this helps.

Can you say realistically how quickly I can make a basic photo sharing app using your tutorial, if I know zero iOS programming, but am reasonably good at Ruby, Rails, HTML, CSS, JS?

I've been programming C/C++ for 15+ years. I would have to say if you know nothing about C/C++ programming, then your biggest hurdles will be:

1) learning how to program in Objective C 2) learning how to use Xcode (probably one of the worst IDEs I've ever used) 3) learning how to use the specific parts of the iPhone like iteracting with the camera, etc.

There will be a lot of issues to deal with, such as accessing the camera, storing the photo, uploading it to the web site, etc, that are non-trivial. Without a knowledge of C/C++, it might take you on the order of months, not days.

I picked up "Beginning iPhone 4 Development" and was new to both iPhone develoment and MacOS. It took me about 2 weeks to get a working app that just posted text to a Google App Engine backend, although a lot of progress was made over 1 weekend of straight coding and playing around. My biggest frustration was learning how to use Xcode, but I basically just followed the book and it ended up being a pretty good tutorial.

I don't want to be a hater, but $50 for a video tutorial that promises to teach you iPhone development in under 1 hr sounds unlikely. There are A LOT of details that need to be addressed, and I feel like the "Beginning iPhone 4 Development" book is pretty damn good as an introduction, so that's probably money better spent.

I've used the Beginning iPhone 4 Development book too and I've found it excellent.

Also I used the iPhone development course from Stanford on iTunes U, which is quite comprehensive (these guys will be pretty much competing with this series, which is top notch and also free):

http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/developing-apps-for-ios-...

It will be hard to compete with the free Stanford courses. Especially since the sample looks like it's almost the same format.

It would be better to go the Peepcode route and have ala carte mini videos about specific tasks. How to make a digital photo filter, how to get CoreData working with iCloud, how to make a complicated UI, etc. There are a lot of materials out there about beginning iOS development. There are not very many materials about intermediate-advanced iOS development.

The other option would be to really amp up the production values. All video lessons I've seen, including the Stanford ones, are simply too slow. I usually watch them in 2x speed. The other problem is that the Xcode view is never optimized. It's always slightly difficult to see the text. Much moreso if you are watching it on an external TV set.

Thanks for the mention of the Stanford courses: I just watched the first one, in which Paul Hegarty explains iOS' interpretation of the MVC pattern (including iOS-specific terms like 'outlet', 'delegate', 'target', 'action' etc., which are used in Interface Builder and XCode).

His slides are awesome too. He uses my favourite font: Comic Sans MS ;-)

I've found the font a bit too distracting, but the content is definitely good :)

The Standford course ain't updated for new iOS 5 features, more over they have not put the fall'11 class on iTunes for public :(

I know some C (it was my first language), but haven't used it in years, so it's a bit rusty. Thanks for sharing your experience though. I'll check out the book.

Take a look at Objective-c for Rubyists from peepcode.

Thanks! What we really need is a Ryan Bates for iOS...

If creating the backend isn't much of a problem for you, I think getting your hands dirty to code it out in a few days (and get used to Obj-C & the iOS model) seems realistic for a basic photo sharing app.

1 week, 2-3 hours per day?

Sounds reasonable enough. If you get stuck halfway, I don't mind helping you out (for free of course). Just drop me a line (email in profile).

Thanks a lot, that's very nice of you!

Your email is not showing in your profile. You need to put it in the about field because the email field is private.

I'd be curious to know this as well. I don't have much programming language experience but am good at HTML5/Js.

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