How-To

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly 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 each week on this adventure, and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 7 of the series. If you're just getting started now, check out the beginning of the series here (this post has been updated to Swift 1.2, iOS 8 and Xcode 6.3)

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. You often need to make changes to the prototype based on the feedback you receive. However, once the dust has settled, you need to turn the prototype into a real app. This 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.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly 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 each week on this adventure, and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 5 of the series. If you're just getting started now, check out the beginning of the series here.

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. (This post has been updated to iOS 8, Xcode 6.3 and Swift 1.2). 

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly 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 each week on this adventure, and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 2 of the series. If you're just getting started now, check out the beginning of the series here (This post has been updated to iOS 8, Xcode 6.3 and Swift 1.2.)

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

Have you ever wanted to mess with someone’s phone on April Fool’s day? Apart from locking their phone by mistyping their password over and over again (don’t do that!) or changing their password, here are couple of ways to mess with your friends on April 1st.

If you have a cool video on your computer that you want to put on your phone, follow these steps using iTunes.

The Flyover feature of Apple's Maps, as you likely know, gives you a 3D view of a city. A list of these cities can be found on the website Flyover Cities. In iOS 8 Apple added a fun new feature called Flyover Tour that takes you on a 3D tour of the city's major landmarks. The Flyover Tour of New York City includes the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State Building, Central Park, and more. Only some of the Flyover cities have a Flyover Tour. They include New York City, San Francisco, London, Paris, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Sydney.

If you have an older iOS device, such as an iPhone 4S, you have probably chosen not to update to iOS 8. Which means you're missing the fun of sending audio messages to your friends and family. The way around that is to record and share brief Voice Memos instead.

Messages, emails, notes, reminders, there are so many ways to give your thumbs a workout while using an iPhone. Getting your iPhone typing up to speed can be a real time saver. Here are a few suggestions that will have you thumbing out messages speedily and with ease: