The mobile phone and the internet have already transformed peoples’ social lives and made a great impact in the workplace. Most of us can still remember the first clunky handsets became available as executive toys or car phones, not something for the masses.

But today the workplace is on the verge of becoming truly mobile, totally virtual to the concept of the “office”. In fact it is no exaggeration to suggest that the concept of the office that we and particularly our parents grew up with will be completely redrawn over the next five to 10 years as mobility becomes woven right into the fabric of working practices across enterprises of all sizes.

Indeed the impact of this impending mobility revolution will be felt most strongly in smaller organisations, the SMEs, which generally have not yet given staff remote access to communications and messaging services.

Introduction

iOS is the operating system at the heart of iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad devices.

The iOS platform was built using the knowledge that went into the creation of Mac OS X, and many of the tools and technologies used for development on the platform have their roots in Mac OS X as well. Despite its similarities to Mac OS X, iOS does not require experience developing Mac OS X applications. The iOS Software Development Kit (SDK) provides everything you need to get started creating iOS applications.

Who Should Read This Document
iOS Technology Overview is an introductory guide for anyone who is new to the iOS platform. It provides an overview of the technologies and tools that have an impact on the development process and provides links to relevant documents and other sources of information. You should use this document to do the following:

The introduction of iPad creates new opportunities for application development using iOS. Because it runs iOS, an iPad is capable of running all of the same applications already being written for iPhone and iPod touch. However, the larger screen size of iPad also means that there are now new opportunities for you to create applications that go beyond what you might have done previously.

This document introduces the new features available for iPad and shows you how to use those features in your applications. However, just because a feature is available does not mean that you have to use it. As a result, this document also provides guidance about when and how you might want to use any new features in order to help you create compelling applications for your users.

Porting the Sample Code to the iPhone
The process of porting the sample code from the book to the iPhone highlights some of the unique features of the iPhone. In particular, some of the unique features of the development environment include:

• The use of Objective C
• The process of creating an EGL rendering context using the EAGLContext.
• Detection of device capabilities and creating an OpenGL ES 2.0 context
• The use of a framebuffer object as the primary rendering surface

Once you have created and setup a rendering context, programming with OpenGL ES 2.0 on the iPhone is identical to any other platform. However, there are some unique aspects of the platform that are worth understanding before jumping into the code.

The iPhone SDK provides the tools and resources needed to create native iPhone applications that appear as icons on the user’s Home screen. Unlike a web application, which runs in Safari, a native application runs directly as a standalone executable on an iPhone OS–based device. Native applications have access to all the features that make the iPhone and iPod touch interesting, such as the accelerometers, location service, and Multi-Touch interface. They can also save data to the local file system and even communicate with other installed applications through custom URL schemes.

In iPhone OS, you develop native applications using the UIKit framework. This framework provides fundamental infrastructure and default behavior that makes it possible to create a functional application in a matter of minutes. Even though the UIKit framework (and other frameworks on the system) provide a significant amount of default behavior, they also provide hooks that you can use to customize and extend that behavior.