iPhone Dev 101: Downloading and Installing the iPhone SDK

We're continuing our series of iPhone Dev 101 posts -- a TUAW feature devoted to beginning iPhone developers. I'm going to spend a little time talking about where to download and how to install the SDK. Let's first talk about what exactly an SDK is.

A software development kit is a set of tools and APIs (application programming interface) that allows a programmer the ability to develop for a specific system. Therefore, the iPhone SDK gives you the ability to program for the iPhone.

The SDK is just a waste of space on your hard drive unless you know the programming language associated with the iPhone. To program on the iPhone, you will need some Cocoa (Objective-C) knowledge. There are a ton of resources available online and in book form -- I'll cover these and more in the next post in the series. If you already know a programming language like C/C++/Java, then you should just need a refresher course on the classes, methods, and basic expressions.

To download Apple's iPhone SDK, you'll need an Apple ID -- this is a free account that you can use to access multiple Apple services including iTunes, Apple Discussions, the online store, and the developer site. If you don't have an account, you can easily get one on the iPhone Dev Center.

Continue reading to learn how to download and install the iPhone SDK.

To download the SDK:

Open http://developer.apple.com/iphone in your web browser. This is the iPhone Dev Center, and it offers multiple resources for the iPhone.
Click the "Login" button on the right-hand side of the page. Use the following pages to either login using your Apple ID, or create a new Apple ID.
Upon successful login, you will be returned to the Dev Center main page. Under the downloads section you should see a link to "iPhone SDK for iPhone OS 2.2." Clicking this link will start the ~1.6GB download -- the download process could take up to 3 hours (or longer) depending on your Internet connection speed.

Installing the SDK is very simple:

Once the download is complete, find where the .dmg file was downloaded to (normally the desktop, or User > Downloads folder). Double-click on it to open the disk image.
Double-click on the installer package inside of the disk image. The installer will launch and allow you to install the SDK. Just follow the on-screen instructions. Remember that installing the SDK will eat up about 2-3GBs of hard disk space; you can install the SDK on an external hard drive if necessary.

Once the installation is completed you will notice that a new "Developer" folder will be placed on the top level of your hard drive. In this folder you will find the main tools that are used to create iPhone applications. In a future iPhone Dev 101 post I'll explain what each of the applications do, and how you can use them to create your first iPhone application.

Stay tuned next week, as I'll give you some valuable Cocoa programming resources.

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We're continuing our series of iPhone Dev 101 posts -- a TUAW feature devoted to beginning iPhone developers. I'm going to spend a little...

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devyn

So... has this series dropped or not? We want more, TUAW!

March 03 2009 at 10:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

mtfootfun

I, too, would like to hear more. How about a Hello World tutorial?

February 16 2009 at 5:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

richardson.mel

Will this series be continued or has it been dropped.
It says followup will be "next week" but it has been two weeks since.

Just letting the authur know that there are some people eagerly anticipating the continuation of this series, or at least some news about it.

I realize that some things come up and that sometimes we promise more than we might be able to deliver within that period of time.

Just let us know, is this still in the works?

Thanks.

February 12 2009 at 8:10 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to richardson.mel's comment

Kevin Ashworth

Wondering the same. Hope it hasn't been dropped!

February 12 2009 at 9:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

MattjDrake

Great post! This should get people to get started with this iPhone coding. For those above who were looking for some resources on Objective-C I have started to create some tutorials geared toward jumping in quickly with iPhone coding. Here is that website:
http://howtomakeiphoneapps.com

It also has a "rolodex" page with some book links and other resources I started collecting to help get over the learning curve.

February 04 2009 at 8:42 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Nathan B

Ugh, if you don't know what an SDK is, or can't download it and install it yourself, then you sure can't write a useful app. We don't need more crap on the App Store - we need more quality apps.

You can do C++ and Objective C, but you're really fighting the system and will have to create lots of wrappers and shims between the two object worlds. You really want to proxy NSString to std::string for every OS and your object model? Just learn Objective C, it's not that hard.

January 27 2009 at 3:08 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Anthony

Hey guys, thanks for the tutorial.

This is really handy, and has given me the ultimate excuse to waste some time!

Cheers,

Anthony.
http://iphoneauctions.com.au

January 26 2009 at 6:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jash Sayani

Nice to see iPhone Dev 101... Hope to see tutorials on making apps... BTW, I have a video that shows how to make a HelloWorld app with Interface builder in under 5 minutes.... In case, you want to post it.....

January 26 2009 at 4:43 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

rschoenburg

Check out this tutorial site, and beware. Apple's examples and documentation are terrible.

http://icodeblog.com/

January 26 2009 at 2:07 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

ThreeBKK

(IMHO) The headline would sound much better if written like:

Download and Installation of the iPhone SDK.

[or]

Downloading and Installing the iPhone SDK.

January 25 2009 at 10:47 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Alex Bates

I finished all of that about 2 months ago. I have made a few tab bar based apps since then but nothing that requires any knowledge with Objective-C. I hope to start learning that soon so keep up the good articles TUAW.

January 25 2009 at 9:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply