iPhone is rapidly mobilizing internet users & creating its own standards.

At the time this post is written, there are millions of iPhones in use & numbers are increasing really fast. So, it is becoming very hard to stay in-compatible with it.

There are 2 main ways to deliver your content / product into iPhone:

• As an application
• As a compatible website (can act like an application)

The major differences between them are, an application can use all the iPhone features (like sounds, movements…), work offline where a webpage cannot (technically yes but it is not functional) and an application can be sold / distributed via the iPhone store.

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iPhone Application Development Tools

Tools that are must when creating for iPhone like the SDK or the optional ones that you’ll find very handy.

iPhone Dev Center By Apple

The main & official source for creating iPhone applications. It provides great & very detailed information & iPhone SDK can be downloaded from here.

Free membership is required for reaching the content. To download development tools like Xcode & distribute your iPhone apps via the store, you need the pay for it.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is an open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the powerful features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript.

iPhoney - Free iPhone Web Simulator

iPhoney, powered by Safari,  gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development

TestiPhone.com - Free iPhone Simulator

A web based application that enables you to test the look & dimensions of iPhone applications.

iUI

A very functional iPhone UI library. It aims to turn standards-based HTML into iPhone compatible interfaces.

To give an example: it transforms <a> tags into sliding interfaces rather then opening a new page. You can read the introduction of the author & see an example (digg for iPhone) created with it.

iPhone Interface Samples

In this page, you can find samples for iPhone interface elements like buttons, fonts, text, design patterns, hacks 6 more.

iPhone Compatible CSS layouts

Free website layouts which work in all the common web browsers including Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch (see WRD post for details).

iPhone Development Plugin For Aptana Studio

This plugin adds some features to Aptana Studio like:

• Preview support for your iPhone applications
• Starter files for iPhone projects
• Easy import of Ajax libraries into iPhone projects
• Local server enables you to run your apps right on the iPhone
• Integrated ‘iPhone Firebug’ for logging and command execution
• Help and online documentation

Morfik AppsBuilder

Morfik’s AppsBuilder has support for creating iPhone applications.

Objective-C Google data APIs library

A framework which enables Objective-c developers (programming language of Mac & iPhone apps) to use Google data API.

This makes it very easy for any iPhone application to reach Blogger, Youtube, Calendar, Spreadsheets & more.

 

iPhone Application Development Tutorials

Reading the experiences of developers who created iPhone applications 6 websites is great to learn faster. Here are several tutorials & experiences.

iPhone Application Development, Step By Step

Step by step guide on creating a simple iPhone game which presents items from a Yahoo! News RSS feed, with images and titles. The challenge is to match an image with the headline it illustrates. To play, you click(or tap) on an image, then click (or tap) on a headline. If they match, you’re given the opportunity to read the story.

iPhone Application Examples From iPhoneWebDev

Very helpful examples are provided like "Emulating a Native iPhone-Style App", "Compression" & more.

iPhone Development Central - Video Tutorials

Video tutorials that are well-categorized for any level of users. Some of the tutorials are:

• Hello World
• Custom Drawing
• Animation

iCode iPhone Blog

A blog specially focused on iPhone application development with beautiful tutorials like:

• Creating a ToDo List Using SQLite - Part 1 -Part 2 - Part 3
• Populating UITableView With An NSArray
• Transitioning Between Views

IBM DeveloperWorks

Some very detailed tutorials on developing iPhone applications with Eclipse, Ruby, & PHP-XML.

• Develop iPhone Web applications with Eclipse
• Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3
• iPhone development with PHP and XML

Learn How To Develop For The iPhone - From NETTUTS

A nice tutorial about building an alternate page and style sheet for the iPhone and iTouch. Also, detecting the orientation of the device - whether it is landscape or portrait.

iPhone SDK Articles

A blog with detailed iPhone SDK tutorials like:

• First iPhone Application
• Tab Bar Controller Tutorial
• Using WebView to open an URL

Build a Simple RSS reader for the iPhone

A tutorial about building a simple RSS reader for iPhone using the iPhone SDK.

Building an Advanced RSS reader using TouchXML

Step by step information for creating an advanced RSS reader for iPhone.

iPhone-App Development for Web Hackers

A tutorial about an application with geo-location features + nice tips for a beginner as this was also the first iPhone application experience of the author.

 

Media For iPhone Application Development

There are 2 links below which may seem less. But they are almost all the media resources you may need for iPhone development.

iPhone GUI PSD File

An iPhone user interface PSD file. The set includes a comprehensive library of assets – all fully editable.

35 Free iPhone Icon Sets

Speckyboy has compiled 35 free iPhone icon sets which are beautiful & various enough that you can find a great icon set to fit your taste of design.

Thanks to iPhone Toolbox, I met a post of them very close to completing this post: Hand Picked iPhone Application Development Resources, learned some other tools & added them to the list.

Please share any other tools, tutorials & other information regarding iPhone application development in the comments.