My newest video, Non-Programmers Guide To Building iOS Apps, is now available from Infinite Skills. iOS, of course, is the operating system for the iPhone and iPad. When you develop an app for iOS, you are developing a native app for the iPhone or iPad (or both). The iPod touch works just like an iPhone (as far as apps are concerned), so your iPhone app would also run on an iPod touch.
Anyone can learn how to develop iOS apps. It doesn’t require super-human intelligence, even though it may seem like magic. To compare it to an alchemical experiment, the iOS Software Development Kit, or SDK, and the Xcode development environment, are the forge and crucible. You speak, or rather write code, in the programming language called Objective-C. The SDK comes with all the frameworks you need to forge an app, and Xcode is the tool you use to bring it all together.
Developing iOS apps can also be the most fun you’ve had in years, with very little investment of time and money. iOS apps are small enough to figure out how to do. A single developer — or one with a partner and maybe some graphics support — can do an app. You don’t need a 20-person project with endless procedures and processes and meetings.
Before plunging into Objective-C and doing some coding, you need to know a bit more about what makes a good iOS app. This course will show you. You also need to know more (actually quite a bit more) about the iOS technologies that work behind the screen — such as frameworks, windows, views, and view controllers, which I introduce in this course. And when you’re done developing the app, you need to become acquainted the details about getting your app ready for the App Store and the public. I go over all these details in this course.
iOS app development can be simplified to a 3-step process:
- Design the user interface.
- Write the code in Objective-C.
- Build, run, and test your app.
You can do steps 1 and 3 without knowing how to write code in Objective-C. You can learn the mechanics of creating an app and taking it all the way to the distribution process, before learning Objective-C. So, you can learn a lot from this training — even if you don’t know what this Objective-C code does.
So follow along with this training course and you too will have more fun programming than ever before!
Lost my iPod Classic. Got a new iPod Touch. Used my Macbook Pro to load everything I had in iTunes onto the new iPod Touch. Now there are gaps in my playlists where the title of the missing song appears, but it is dim and a red symbol appears on the right hand column of the screen The symbol is a solid red square inside a rectangular red box. I cannot find a solution to this anywhere in your book Can you guide me in recovering these random gaps in my playlists? Todd B.
I have also run across this problem with the red icon. The solution is outlined in an Apple support technical tip:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5397140
For other similar problems, such as songs not syncing and showing a dotted gray circle icon, see this:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5524609?tstart=0
Thanks for reading!
Tony