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Kevin McNeish's picture

Kevin McNeish is author of the new "iOS App Development for Non-Programmers" book series (www.iOSAppsForNonProgrammers.com), winner of the 2012 Publishing Innovation Award.

Kevin is also an award-winning app developer, software architect, and well-known software conference speaker in the U.S. and abroad. He has spent much of his career making difficult concepts easy to understand for the uninitiated.

Follow Kevin on Twitter: @kjmcneish.

Unleash Your Inner App Developer - Code Writing First Steps

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Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to build it? In this blog series, How to Unleash Your Inner App Developer, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Join me on this adventure and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be!

In my previous post, I mentioned Objective-C, the language of iOS Apps, is an object-oriented programming language. This means when you write code, you are mostly interacting with objects—both visual and non-visual. Working with an object-oriented language is a great advantage for non-programmers who want to learn programming. In this post I'll talk about these advantages, and we'll even get you to write your first lines of code!



Unleash Your Inner App Developer - The Big Picture

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Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to build it? In this blog series, How to Unleash Your Inner App Developer, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Join me on this adventure and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be!

In my last several posts, we have created a prototype app called iAppsReview that allows users to rate apps on their iOS devices. Whenever you build an app, it's a best practice to first create a prototype that you can give to your client or potential user base for feedback. Once you get feedback, you often need to make changes to the prototype based on the feedback you receive. However, once the dust has settled, you have to take the prototype and turn it into a real app. That requires writing code. Since this blog series is specifically designed for non-programmers, we need to take a step back and look at the big picture of app development and learn the basics of writing code.



Unleash Your Inner App Developer - Finishing the Prototype

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Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to build it? In this blog series, How to Unleash Your Inner App Developer, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Join me on this adventure and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be!



Unleash Your Inner App Developer - Next Steps

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Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to build it? In this blog series, How to Unleash Your Inner App Developer, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me on this adventure and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be!

In my previous post, you learned about navigating between different scenes in your app, and learned about using custom user-interface controls in your apps. We started building the Write Review scene (shown on the left side of Figure 1), which we will finish in this post, and we'll move on to the App Category scene shown on the right side of Figure 1



Unleash Your Inner App Developer — Adding Navigation

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Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this blog series, How To Unleash Your Inner App Developer, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Join me on this adventure and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be!

In my previous post, we finished up the main screen of the iAppsReview iPhone app. In the process, you learned how to configure a table view, how to add images to a project, and how to use them as launch images as well as in the rows of a table view. 



Unleash Your Inner App Developer - Diving Deeper

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Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this blog series, How To Unleash Your Inner App Developer, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me on this adventure and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be!

In my previous post, we started the process of creating a prototype of an iPhone app called iAppsReview. You learned how to create a new project in Xcode, how to add a storyboard to a project and configure it, and how to add a navigation controller to a storyboard. You had just begun to configure the table view, which we will finish in this post. You'll learn how to create multiple sections in a table view, set section header text, add images to a project, and incorporate them in table-view cells.



The Boston Marathon and the Collective Visual Record

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In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon explosion that claimed three lives and caused critical injuries to many others, the Boston police have requested video and photos taken by spectators near the finish line. Their hope is that they can glean information from pictures or video taken by individuals on mobile phones or other devices. CNET reported that while bystanders have posted video and images on Twitter, the media mainly is of the moments after the blast. The article said investigators will likely be focusing on media from earlier in the day for possible clues.



Unleash Your Inner App Developer with Your First Taste of Xcode

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Do you have an idea for an app, but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this blog series, How To Unleash Your Inner App Developer, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Join me on this adventure and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be!

 

 

After my previous postwhich introduced the tools you'll need to develop apps, I assume you've installed Xcode installed and are ready to get a taste of app developmentI find there is no better way to learn than by doing, so let's dive in and start creating an app.



Tools for Unleashing Your Inner App Developer

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Do you have an idea for an app, but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this blog series, How To Unleash Your Inner App Developer, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Join me on this adventure and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be!

So you want to be an app developer! As I mentioned in my previous post, giving yourself permission to test the waters is the first step in the process. In this week's post, I'll discuss the details of how to get yourself and your computer ready to create apps.



How To Unleash Your Inner App Developer

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Do you have an idea for an app, but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this blog series, Unleashing Your Inner App Developer, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Join me on this adventure and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be! 



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