Certain technologies bring out everyone's hidden geek, and the iPhone did so instantly upon its release. Thousands of programmers want to provide applications on the iPhone. This book shows them how to achieve the spectacular effects that made the iPhone an immediate hit. The book covers both Apple's toolkit and an open, community-developed toolkit that has been widely downloaded and used.

Author Jonathan Zdziarski, the developer of the first fully functional application using the open iPhone toolkit, now explains in clear language how to create applications using Objective-C and the iPhone API, which in some ways resembles Apple's desktop API and in some ways strikes new ground. After covering installation of the toolkits and some background about the operating system and Objective-C, the book offers detailed recipes and working examples for everyone's favorite iPhone feature. Graphics and audio programming, the CoreImage and CoreSurfaces interfaces for games programming, interfacing with iTunes, and the use of sensors are all covered.

Any programmer, using this book, can provide applications that impress users just as much as the official iPhone utilities.

Jonathan Zdziarski is better known as the hacker "NerveGas" in the iPhone development community. He is well known for his work in cracking the iPhone and lead the effort to port the first open source applications. Hailed on many geek news sites for his accomplishments, Jonathan is best known for the first application to illustrate and take full advantage of the major iPhone APIs: NES.app, a portable Nintendo Entertainment System emulator.

Jonathan is also a full-time research scientist and longtime spam-fighter. He is founder of the DSPAM project, a high profile, next-generation spam filter that was acquired in 2006 by a company designing software accelerators. He lectures widely on the topic of spam and is a foremost researcher in the fields of machine-learning and algorithmic theory.

Jonathan's website is zdziarski.com.