iOS App Scaffolding with Crowdbotics in Under 5 Minutes

Here’s how I created my CoinList iOS app with tab views using Crowdbotics’ Swift scaffold.

Co-authored with Vikas Bharti

This is a tutorial on how to create an iOS app using the Crowdbotics App Builder.

Setting up a development environment in XCode for your new app is time consuming. Crowdbotics iOS scaffolding enables you to focus on development rather than project set up. After reading this article you will be able to start iOS app development with Crowdbotics right from the word “go.”

How Crowdbotics helps with your iOS App?

Navigation drawer is a common feature included with most mobile apps. Generally, we have to write several lines of code for this. You can avoid this, though, by using Crowdbotics scaffolding which includes a ready-to-use navigation drawer.

We also don’t have to create a git repo to maintain our codebase with the Crowdbotics App Builder. Crowdbotics automatically creates a GitHub repo for us.

Here are a few more advantages of using Crowdbotics for buiding iOS apps:

A starter XCode workspace with a CocoaPod Podfile — listing the default and user selected pods is hosted here. This starter workspace has the following

1. A single view controller and a storyboard
2. Storyboard and Code for Left Navigation Menu with basic menu options
3. Left Navigation VC with sample menu options. Please change this.
4. A PodFile with 2 default pods — pod ‘IQKeyboardManagerSwift’, pod ‘SideMenu’ Other pods added via setup will also be here
5. The developer must do a Pod Install. Pod code is not committed to GitHub. Feel free to change this behavior.

Build an iOS app with the Crowdbotics scaffold

Right, so now we are going to create an account Crowdbotics to see how it works.

• Head over to the Crowdbotics App Builder.
• Choose Swift. Name your application, and enter your Email.
• This will take you to your app dashboard, where you can see a link to GitHub, Heroku, and Slack.
• Click on Github and download you Crowdbotics Scaffolding.

Building my CoinList iOS app

To get a feel for the App Builder, her are the instructions for setting up a clone of my CoinList App

We start building by first cloning our Github repo in XCode.

We have our built-in navigation drawer code in LeftViewController. We will build our Tabular view using navigation drawer. There are many ways, to create a Tabular view, I had achieved this in two ways, by using UIPageViewController and UITableViewController to show content Pages/views. For displaying Tabs, I used UITableView. Let’s go in details…

Our CoinList App with Tabular view

Tabular View:
Let's create a tabular view by using a UITableViewController, that has a built-in UITableView. It will work with a simple setup, you just need to add your data array and create a cell. It looks easy and works the way we need.

Fetch Coin Data and Create delegates

Here, I am using UIViewController and once my view is ready, I have fetched data from the server and created four lists to feed into my four Tabs.

Let's Create Individual Coin Tabs

So till now, we have created our TableViewController in which we are using TableViewCell. Now let's create individual tabs to complete this process.

Conclusion

I have added my code here on GitHub.

You can refer this repository If you find this useful.

Thanks for reading my tutorial. Please suggestions for how I can improve tutorials (and code) in the future. Thanks a lot. :-)

By building your app with Crowdbotics, you can avoid much of the initial time-consuming project setup. Crowdbotics also provides some ready to use UI components so you can actually jump into building your app logic, right off the bat.

Additionally, Crowdbotics creates a Gitrepo, and Trello board too, with which you can streamline your development and app management process.

I found the Crowdbotics App Builder pretty helpful. Try it yourself here.

Thanks.