iOS Dev: A Learning Adventure
Originally published at blog.alexpersian.com on April 10, 2015.
So I’m deviating away from my tradional topic of web development for a bit. This is because my friend and I came up with an idea for an iOS app, (beer was involved), and it sparked my curiosity in iOS development enough that I actually decided to set aside time to learn. And since Swift is the hot new thing with Apple, I figured I’d learn that at the same time.
This is where Udacity came in. Their course popped up while I was searching for some basic iOS tutorials. It was geared towards recording and playing back audio, which was one of the key components of our drunken idea, so I gave it a shot and was really satisfied. They also included a lot of great resources in their course notes. I’ve currated them into a small list, written with Angular of course, for quick reference.
So far I have gotten an app working that transitions between two different views, shows/hides UI elements, and plays/stops audio. Beyond those key concepts what I’ve learned is that iOS dev is insanely fun. Xcode was daunting when I used it for my C++ assignments in class, but it becomes an entirely different beast when working in iOS. The documentation integrations, Storyboard visualizations, and Assistant editor are just fantastic. Along with the lightning fast emulator this thing is sliiick.
This is where I’ve gotten so far. More is definitely to come. Placeholder icons are fun!
One of the awesome features of Xcode is side-by-side editing through the Assistant editor. Modifying the UI and then fixing a code issue right away is so fluid.
Also the documentation is amazing!! Pressing option (⌥) and clicking on a method pops out the relavent docs. And the full docs can always be accessed with ⇧⌘0.
Anyways, maybe it’s a honeymoon period, but I’m really starting to love iOS development. (wait, didn’t I say that about Node too?) I’m looking forward to getting more work done on the app, and hopefully it’ll be on the App Store sometime in the near future.
