Unleash Your Inner App Developer Part 3: Diving Deeper
By Kevin McNeish
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 3 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 8.0, Xcode 6.3 and Swift 1.2.)
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.
Unleash Your Inner App Developer Part 2: Your First Taste of Xcode
By Kevin McNeish
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.
Unleash Your Inner App Developer Part 1: Getting Ready
By Kevin McNeish
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. This is Part 1 of the blog series. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be!
Swift Programming 101: The Power of Extensions
By Kevin McNeish
Extensions are one of Swift's best features. Extensions allow you to add behavior to existing classes, including classes in the Cocoa Touch Framework. Apple can't add every feature you want to their framework classes, but they have provided a tool to allow you to do it yourself! In this article, you will learn practical uses for Swift extensions you can use immediately in your iOS projects.
Swift Programming 101: Enhance Your Apps With External Displays
By Kevin McNeish
How would you like to extend the surface area of your app's user interface exponentially? How would your users react if you added multiple display devices to your app, each containing different content? All of this is possible by using an iOS feature many developers are not aware of—external displays.
Swift Programming 101: Advanced Collections
By Kevin McNeish
Swift's advanced collections can help you model more complex objects in your apps and create an API that is easier to understand and use. In this post, I model a chessboard using Swift's subscripts and also cover tuples and multidimensional arrays!
Swift Programming 101: Mastering Protocols and Delegates (Part 2)
By Kevin McNeish
In part 2 of this post on Swift's protocols, you will learn practical uses for declaring custom protocols in your own apps, and learn further how they improve the architecture of your apps and make them easier to enhance and extend.
In part 1 of this post, I demonstrated how to implement existing Cocoa Touch protocols in your apps. Now you'll learn how and why to create your very own. First, we need to cover the basic construction of a Swift protocol.
Swift Programming 101: Mastering Protocols and Delegates (Part 1)
By Kevin McNeish
Protocols are a powerful, advanced tool that help make your apps easier to design and extend. They define standard behavior in classes that are not necessarily related. Protocols used together with delegates allow you to create classes with a well-balanced load of responsibilities.
Swift Programming 101: Inheritance & Polymorphism
By Kevin McNeish
In previous posts I have touched on inheritance in Swift. In this post, I'm going to be diving deeper and giving you a fuller picture of how inheritance works in Swift, and how you can use it to create apps that are easy to extend when you need to add new functionality. Along the way, you will also learn about the important concept of polymorphism and learn how to use Xcode's new playgrounds!
Swift Programming 101: Generics-A Practical Guide
By Kevin McNeish
If you have read Apple's documentation on Generics and were left wondering how you could use this technology in your own projects, this post is for you! You will learn how to take full advantage of generics in your every-day code as well as how to avoid the constant type-casting that usually results from creating generalized code.
