The iPhone is a line of Internet- and multimedia-enabled smartphones designed and marketed by Apple Inc. It functions as a camera phone (also including text messaging and visual voicemail), a portable media player (equivalent to a video iPod), and an Internet client (with e-mail, web browsing, and Wi-Fi connectivity).
Web applications
At the 2007 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Apple announced that the iPhone and iPod Touch would support Web applications created by third-party developers using technologies such as Ajax through the Safari web browser. Apple Inc. considers that web applications capable of providing a sufficient user experience obviate any need for jailbreaking. Additionally, they determined that making native applications other than their own were unnecessary. However, the aforementioned web applications were unsuccessful, because the JavaScript engine running in Mobile Safari was not powerful enough to run applications satisfactorily.
The SDK was released on March 6, 2008, and allows developers to make applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as test them in an "iPhone simulator". However, loading an application onto the devices is only possible after paying an iPhone Developer Program fee. Since the release of Xcode 3.1, Xcode is the development environment for the iPhone SDK. iPhone applications, like iPhone OS and Mac OS X, are written in Objective-C.
Developing iPhone applications is a pleasant and rewarding endeavor. To convert your ideas into products you use Xcode, the integrated development environment (IDE) used to develop iPhone applications. With Xcode you organize and edit your source files, view documentation, build your application, debug your code, and optimize your application’s performance.
