Screencasts and crash-courses aiming to teach how to go from zero to iOS Ninja are flourishing on the internet. The last one I stumbled upon is ExecuteiOS, where “you’ll learn how to build a real app and submit it to the App Store”. In 3 days.

3 days seems like an awful lot of time though, and I bet most of you guys could use a quicker and more concise course to become the next app billionaire ! In this post I am going to teach you how to make an app in 3 minutes, no coding experience required. It’s perfect to fill your coffee break, trust me on that ;)

Prerequisite

A mac with xCode installed, obviously.

Start

First we are going to click on the xCode icon, the blue one with a hammer. It doesn’t mean we are going to nail anything, so don’t run to your toolbox just yet. You should be presented with the following xCode launching screen. If not, you may have clicked on the wrong icon, so try again with a different one until it works (you may lose some critical time here).

We want to create a new app, so just click Create a new project, then on the following screen selectSingle View application (it should be the default choice) and fill out the informations in the next one. Don’t worry if you don’t know what to put, just press some random keys and click on next. Choose where you want to store your new project (on your desktop for instance), and click create.

Build

Atta boy ! You are now presented with an interface where you can really start building your app. There should be a load of gibberish displayed like Deployment target, Build Settings and weird icons here and there. Ignore all that, it’s mainly designed to confuse people anyway. Instead, look on the left sidebar, locate the Main_iPhone.storyboard file and select it.

Gibberish was replaced with something that look pretty much like an iPhone screen, great ! And you know what, it kind of is. Your colored pencils won’t work directly on it though, you’ll have to add colors and images from within the application. No, you can’t copy-paste from Word either, but good on you for thinking outside the box ! Instead, see that little sidebar at the bottom-right of xCode? From here you can add elements to customize your app interface.

Go ahead and scroll until you see the ImageView item. Then — be careful it may be hard if you learned to use your computer with a 2 minutes tutorial — drag the item and drop it on the iPhone screen. It should resize itself to fill the screen completely.

The weird thing is, you put an ImageView item in your iphone, but there is still no image showing. To do that, first you are going to have to drag-and-drop a real image file (take this one for instance) next to the Main_iPhone.storyboard file. Now click again on the ImageView on your screen, and select theattribute inspector icon, it’s the one looking like batman’s belt at the top of the right sidebar. Still in the sidebar, you should now see an empty image field. Just write down the name of your image file, press enter and tadaaa, your image is now embedded into the ImageView !

Run

You have built an awesome app all by yourself, the next step is running it ! To do that, just click on the big Play icon at the top left of xCode. Wait for a few seconds (still losing some time here, sorry about that), and the simulator should launch, immediately starting your app afterward.