Do You Want to Learn How to Make an iPhone App?

There is a not-so-secretive secret to those of you out there who are curious about iPhone application development and desire a more structured learning experience outside of a book.

The Stanford University iPhone course is a great resource, and best of all, it’s free. Yep, it costs nothing more than your time and some bandwidth (assuming you already have everything needed for iPhone app development and iItunes).  Employees from iPhone and iPad development teach the course and post the videos of the lectures and lab sections online a few days after they occur.

I found this course last year, but it was only the presentations and posted after the course was completed.  This time around, you can be taking the course in near real-time, watching the video lectures, downloading example code, and working on the progressively more difficult (and fun) assignments.  Last year’s course gave me a firm foundation, where I learned more from these slides and reading documentation than the random tutorials found online.

I am taking the course again, this time taking notes and immersing myself in all things iPhone OS.  If you’re the least bit interested in iPhone development, check it out!

My Thoughts on the iPad

The secret is finally revealed after years of speculation.  The Apple iPad looks to be storming into user’s hands in the next few months and looks sexy.  Although it was a bit odd watching Steve Jobs hang out on a couch and browse for movie showtimes (while demonstrating that we’re still not going to see Flash when he checked nytimes.com) I was overall impressed, but not blown-away.

Some thoughts:

• The use of the iPhone OS vs. a flavor of OSX shows us that Apple is pitching this as a consumer device, not a personal computer.  This means a tightly controlled user experience that “dumbs down” computers – which is not necessarily a bad thing.  I’ll probably end up recommending this to most of my computer un-savvy friends and family.  Grandma will love this.
• A closed, controlled experience for iPhone OS products (iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad) is one thing, but doing such a thing for traditional computers is another. I shudder to think that this may be the future of OSX, where everything is sandboxed and goes through Apple for approval.  Creativity would suffer, but there is no reason to believe this the path they will take.  It will be interesting to see what Apple looks like a decade from now.
• As Sarah Mitchell writes, the big question is where is the social aspect of the iPad?  I think everyone was expecting to see some type of camera on the face of the tablet and some spiffy video conferencing built in (think iChat).  I have money that next year’s signature Apple event will reveal iPad 2 with this feature.
• Tricky that most people didn’t realize that you’ll need to pony up the extra dough for the “WiFi+3G” model to get GPS built in.
• I’ve seen tons of impressions that say great things about the responsiveness of the platform.  Apple is making the chip (the Apple A4) and one of the things that excites me is that we’ll most likely be seeing this chip in future iPhones in some form.

But the biggest thing that came to my mind while watching the debut was think of all the app possibilities.  With that screen real estate and improved processing capability compared to the iPhone, a whole world of new apps just opened-up.