Beginning iPhone dev
Oh wow, where to start.
I’m writing this a while after I started the actual dev work so I might miss out a few things.
Right, I first started with xCode a few weeks ago. At first, xCode is very, very confusing. When you first see it, it doesn’t make any sense what so ever. Not to worry, I’ve been in this position many times. Learning new code is always kinda fun. It’s like doing puzzle books except far more rewarding.
I first started looking at apple’s startup guides. They had the very basic tutorial that everyone seems to do. Press button = changing text. Horrah.
I went through this tutorial no problem, it helped me to kinda start to understand what the hell was going on with xCode but it’s still like walking through very thick fog when you just know there are bear traps lying around.
After a bit of a wait I managed to get the Head First iPhone development book from our library. This had four main application tutorials within but they covered a lot of things in those three apps. The first one, again, is the press button makes text change app. Oooh look mah, i can make da apple appy apps.
Anyway, the next app was a bit more interesting, a Twitter app. This one let you post straight to your twitter account and showed you how to use the picker and also keyboard input. Fancy.
Second app is entitled DrinkMixer. This one is quite a long chapter mainly due to the fact that they actually tell you useful things and how xCode uses and sees the code you write. Basically its like a very complicated tree that loops into itself. I only just about understand it now, but understanding it VS making an app that works that we can sell in a few weeks is something for a later post.
The DrinkMixer app is a list view app. A big list of drinks that when you click on a drink it shows the detail on how to make the drink and its ingredients. Fantastic, you learn a fair bit about the navigation controller here as well as the Dictionary, plists and other such wonders of basic app creation. From this guide alone you could produce a nice lookin app that you could sell for some change or at least get a few downloads.
And then I had to return the book.
I should point out, other things happened during the course of me going through this book and the tutorials within in. Mainly to do with the Celtic Manor and the Ryder Cup, but thats for another post as it’s fairly detailed and actually involves other app related goodness.
