Saturday, July 12, 2014

Design Programming with Apple SDK - Part 2

Go back - Design Programming with Apple SDK - Part 1

Basic App Creation

Now that we have Xcode set-up on our Mac, we can start developing our iOS App. We are going to create
a very basic app that consists of a text field and a button that updates that text field. So let’s get started. The first thing we need to do is to open Xcode.

After the installation process is complete, Xcode can be found in the Applications folder. If you plan on getting started developing iOS apps, you should consider adding Xcode to the dock of your Mac. The first time that you open Xcode, you might have to agree to the software license and install some additional software components. Just follow the prompts on the screen to get started.

When Xcode has opened, click Create a new Xcode project or choose the File Menu, then choose New, then choose Project. For our new project we will choose the Single View Application template. Clicking next will bring up a page where we have to name our app. Choose a Product Name (e.g. TestProject) and Company Identifier (e.g. com.mysite). For the Class Prefix, it is easy if you use the same name as the Product Name. For the Device Family, you can select iPhone. Make sure the Use Storyboards and Use Automatic Reference Counting options are checked and that Include Unit Tests is not checked. Click Next. Find a location where you would like to save the project folder; make sure that Create local git repository for this project is not checked because we will not be needing any version control for this project. Then click Create.

Now you should now have a window open with an intimidating amount of items located on it. Let’s go through a quick walkthrough of the items in the window to begin to understand what the different features in the window actually do. In the upper left are the Run and Stop buttons that are used to launch and stop the app on an iOS Simulator or device. To the right of these are the Scheme pop-up menus that configure how the app is run for testing. On the top right side are the Editor and View Buttons that control what is being displayed in our main work-screens.

There should be three main sections in the open window. The area on the left is called the Navigator; this helps us find the different files for our project. The area in the middle is called the Editor; this is where we can make changes to the files. The area on the right is called the Utilities area – we will not be using this area now, so you can close it if you like by pressing the right View button. There is also an area on the bottom that can be accessed from the middle View button; this area is the Debug area that can help us in – you guessed it – debugging.

Read Next - Design Programming with Apple SDK - Part 3

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