iPhone development has created a huge business opportunity for many companies, and the possibilities are only increasing with the announcement of the iPad and constantly improving software. Part of this business involves not only developing applications, but also helping other people develop applications in an easy, hassle-free way. Two companies trying to do this, SachManya and SelfServeApplications, have recently announced new products for this very task.

Chillingo has announced Crystal SDK, a service that is meant to bring a social network to iPhone games. To date, the iPhone has no official social network service, although many people and companies are doing their part to try to change this. Chillingo is one of those companies. They’ve launched the official web site and are asking iPhone game developers interested in the service to try Crystal SDK to see all what it has to offer for their games.

The home of Windows is now, ironically, the home of the world’s first course for iPhone development certification. The University of Washington is offering a professional certification program consisting of three classes to help students obtain a good base in becoming solid developers. Despite Stanford University’s decision to make their iPhone development class (taught by Apple employees) available for free on iTunes U, UW has decided to have a richer experience for students by offering the full course.

After the WWDC announcements last week, there is a lot to be excited about when it comes to developing for the iPhone. One thing that can potentially help applications run smoother and faster (especially when it comes to networking on the iPhone) is threading. Threading allows developers to run two or more tasks in concurrency. Apple makes this pretty easy in Objective-C and XCode.

Last week, we talked about frameworks in relation to developing for the iPhone. With iPhone OS 3.0, Apple has updated and added many frameworks, as well as other interesting tidbits for iPhone developers. For instance, push notifications will now be included into the operating systems and will allow developers to send updates to users without their app being in the foreground. From a developer standpoint, this creates a lot more functionality for an app. Furthermore…

A while back, we were discussing memory management and how that works when developing for the iPhone. This time, I will be talking about frameworks, which contain code that can make programming something easier, but isn’t necessarily needed in every program.

After discussing iPhone file types last week, we can move on to memory management. On the current version of the iPhone, there is only 128MB of RAM, which is far lower than the usual 2+GB we see on desktop and laptop Macs. iPhone developers must keep this in mind when they are designing their games and writing their code in order to reduce the number of crashes and give the user a great experience with their app.

Now that we’ve got beta testing out of the way, we can discuss the different file types found in XCode. When starting a new project, XCode allows developers to choose from a variety of different starting points for their applications. For iPhone developing, some of the options include Navigation Controller projects or Tab Bar Controller projects. These aren’t file types per se, but they do affect what files you start with.

If you’re like me, you absolutely love coding the back end to apps, but you have very little design sense. To me, the fun lies in solving the problem, not necessarily in making a great interface (although I do know that it is just as important as the back end). Thankfully Interface Builder comes with the iPhone SDK developer tools and allows programmers to easily lay out and visualize what their interface will look like. When it comes to creating this part of the app, it would be a lot more difficult without Interface Builder.

Hey everyone, I would like to announce the first post of a new weekly column I will be starting called iPhone Developer Intervention. This column will be mostly dedicated towards anything related to the iPhone SDK or developing for the iPhone as well as programming ideas in general. Through my experiences with the App Store, iPhone SDK, and XCode, I hope to help all of the readers to understand more what it’s like to develop for the iPhone and what Apple as well as other developers are doing to help out.