Where can I find a tutorial for building a simple OpenGL app for an iPhone newbie?

Question

I'd like to get into iPhone development (mainly OpenGL & games stuff, no GUI apps). Got 10+ years experience of thorough Windows development, mostly C++ / win32 api, some OpenGL. However I have absolutely NO experience with Mac or Apple whatsoever.

I'm confident I'll pick up the concepts without any trouble, but I got no clue where to begin, or even how to setup an iPhone development environment. Should I use GCC? or Xcode (is that an IDE and/or compiler?) and is there a step-by-step introduction somewhere to create an initial project?

There's an overkill of info and tutorials out there, but they all seem to assume some initial Mac development knowledge which I don't have. An absolute newbie tutorial on creating an OpenGL "hello world" for iPhone step by step from scratch would be awesome.

Does anyone what would be a good place to start for me?

Answer 1

1 -- The example projects in XCode on the Mac make excellent starting points. XCode is an IDE... and if you set the target to "simulator" it just pops up the iPhone simulator. Fire it up, you can't miss it. Download from developer.apple.com.

2 -- I really liked the book "The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK"

3 -- Objective C is kinda quirky but you get used to it quickly enough, plenty of web resources and books are easy to find.

Answer 2

I would also take a look at Stanford University's free iTunes U course in iPhone development. It's a great, thorough explanation of the iPhone platform and Objective-C. There's a "Hello World" tutorial in there, but the videos go much farther and will give you a good deep dive into the ecosystem. There is an OpenGL ES section as well.

If you haven't done so yet, you will need to either buy a Mac or build a Hackintosh, since you have to have OSX for development.