Do I even need to learn the Iphone SDK if I am going to use Unity? Also do I even need to purchase a Mac if I am going to use Unity as well?
No you don’t need to know Obj-C and the iPhone SDK. Yes, if you want to use Unity iPhone, you’ll need a Mac because the final step uses XCode to compile apps.
Further to Jeff’s note. You will need to be able to get yourself around in Xcode not in a programming way, but know enough about setting/changing bundle identifiers, setting up development versus release settings, and managing your certificates etc when doing the build.
But no, you don’t need to technically know Obj-C beyond being familiar with the IDE itself.
But even a basic knowledge will help.
(With thanks to my patient programming mentors over the last few years 'round these parts.)
Thanks for the response! Would there be any advantage of even learning objectiveC or the iphone SDK when it comes to unity?
You’ll need to be able to build and run the SDK samples on the iphone before you can use Unity.
You need a Mac to develop for the iPhone even with Unity.
For basics, you really don’t need to know objective-C. It is possible to do an entire game without a single line of code in objective-C. In more advanced things though, it helps to know a bit of what you’re doing with the sdk. Unity does have some (workaround) ways to interact with native iphone functionality such as the keyboard, video playback, etc., and all of these require dabbling in the inner workings of the code generated when you build your app from Unity.
Short term? No, not really. Longer term? Yes. I say that because we’ll be adding features to allow you to write your own Objective-C code in the XCode project and then expose that code to your Unity scripting, thus allowing you to implement additional and unique features that aren’t included in Unity “out of the box”.
Thank you everyone for your response.
-j